While on leave, Blueblood meets his hero, A. K. Yearling, and is dragged into a Daring Do story he would much rather have read.
The Heartlands Campaign has reached a stalemate, and the Guards Division pauses to lick its wounds and prepare for the next offensive. While on leave, Prince Blueblood meets his hero, A. K. Yearling, and is dragged into a Daring Do story he would much rather have read.
The following extract from what has become known as ‘The Blueblood Papers’ by our close circle of memorialists, archivists, and historians is unusual in that it does not deal directly with the major battles and political intrigue that took place during the Changeling War, though Prince Blueblood briefly alludes to the military and political situation in this extract. I had reservations about the decision to share this particular extract even within our circle, owing to the disturbing revelations contained within that remain a closely-guarded state secret. However, after close consultation with Princess Cadance of the Crystal Empire and Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria, we are in agreement that such knowledge should be shared amongst our circle so that you may use it to combat this hidden threat, should it present itself once more. Indeed, it has been a threat akin to a weed or a cancer, always returning when thought vanquished for good.
Before you read the following extract, I must make it clear that its contents remain a state secret and must be maintained as such. I am aware that some of our circle are prone to idle gossip about these papers, treating them as one would a series of exciting adventure stories instead of the serious scholarly work that they are, and I have tolerated this knowing that it would be impossible to stop and that I ought to be content that my nephew’s memory is being kept alive. However, in this case I insist on a total prohibition of discussion of the contents of this extract beyond the members of our circle. Any leaks, and I will know who is responsible, will be punished to the full extent of the law.
As before, I have taken it upon myself to edit the extract, limiting direct edits to merely correcting minor spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors for readability. Though Prince Blueblood demonstrates startling skills of recollection in putting together these private memoirs, his tendency to restrict himself to events that he had directly experienced or held strong feelings about (and very often write at length about them despite having little to do with the matter at hoof) can prove frustrating for those desiring a more complete examination of the historical events he describes. Therefore, I have added explanatory comments in the text where appropriate, which are in parenthesis, italicised, and written red ink. In the main, however, the text remains Blueblood’s own testimony.
H.R.H. Princess Celestia
***
If you, dear reader, whomever you are, have paid close attention to what I have written in these private memoirs (and if you are reading them, I’m either long dead or you’ve broken into my home), you would know that what usually happens after one of these instances of accidental or dubious heroism is that everypony present gives me a collective pat on the back, I’m told that I’m a very brave stallion and I am given a medal to show for it, and then I am shoved back to the frontline to do it all over again. This particular ‘adventure’ I’m about to relate here ended rather differently, with ponies in black suits and black neckties whisking me away to a dark cell somewhere, the location of which still remains a mystery to me but I can make some educated guesses as to which S.M.I.L.E. basement safehouse it was, and informing me in rather threatening terms not to breathe a word of what I found down there to any creature one is capable of having a conversation with. They did not, however, stipulate that I could not write it all down in a secret document that, I hope, will not be read until long after my inevitable demise, whether by old age or by the blade of a lover’s husband, and this would no longer be an issue for me.
It is a great relief to me, in my advanced years, to finally relay what I saw in the crypts under Fort Nowhere, but I suppose I ought to put things in their proper historical milieu - to set the scene, as it were. I had escaped from Marelacca with a hoof-full of other captured Equestrian soldiers, some slaves the ponies had brought over from the Badlands, and a crew of Changelings who fancied their luck in a cosy prisoner of war camp out in the empty, boring middle part of our fair realm to wait out the end of the war. It was something of a bittersweet farewell, as though I was desperate to return to a place not swarming with Chrysalis’ feared Blackhorns, I could not help but fear for those I had left behind, in particular, Spring Rain and her family. However, when it became readily apparent that our arrival in Equestria would not be the triumphant return Square Basher and I had hoped for, especially when we finally crash-landed in an empty part of the kingdom and were forced to spend an extra two days locked up in the cells of a rural police station, populated by half-drunk yokels who were convinced that the Changelings had singled out their tiny hamlet to be the spearhead for their invasion, I soon found that I had more pressing matters to deal with.
I had hoped for a nice, lengthy convalescence in the company of some attractive nurses in Canterlot, as I had done after being flogged half to death, but unfortunately for me, the wounds I had suffered in my latest daring escape were judged to have been ‘superficial’ by a bored doctor who clearly had a long line of ponies to see and wanted to clock off work on time for once, and I was sent packing once again to the Badlands with scarcely enough time to receive the most pathetic and grovelling apology I’d ever received in my life from a village sheriff mortified to learn that he’d locked up the real Prince Blueblood as I left. However, Lady Luck saw fit to grant me one of her very rare boons, which, as ever, was merely a velvet curtain draped over a precariously-stacked pile of horrible misfortune about to fall right on top of me as I admired said metaphorical curtain.
Still, most ponies were rather pleased to see me back when I slinked back to divisional HQ, which surprised me, frankly. The others, including Sergeant Major Square Basher, presumably had their own little soiree away from the boring old officers. Major-General Garnet organised a little welcome party for me, overflowing with cake and wine, and had invited, well, I hesitate to call them friends but given the nature of our ‘work’ it somehow felt insufficient to merely call them colleagues. ‘Comrades’ is probably the word that I’m looking for.
“Look at him,” sneered Blitzkrieg as I wandered in, “he’s got a bloody suntan. Did you enjoy your holiday, Prince?”
“Be nice to him,” insisted Starlit Skies, though he couldn’t contain his amused smile. It was merely the typical Trottingham manner, to be unaccountably rude to one’s own friends; if he was nothing but polite and courteous, it would mean that he despised me utterly. “Not everypony could survive being locked up in a Changeling camp for as long as he did and get out in one piece.”
“And blow up an entire Changeling fleet,” said Sunshine Smiles. The intact side of his face mirrored the scar as he smiled with genuine pleasure at seeing me. However, it occurred to me that sometimes ponies spoke about me in much the same manner as Shining Armour gushed about his favourite silly comic book heroes, and that, I considered, might be the real reason behind the irritatingly enduring nature of my supposedly heroic reputation. “My adjutant owes me five bits, now.”
“I’m only worth five bits?” I said, in mock outrage.
“It looked like a close-run thing.”
“I’m always nice,” snapped Blitzkrieg, as he reached up and patted me on the shoulder with some force, the small pegasus straining a little to reach. “Good to see you back, mate. We’ll be in the Queen’s Hive in no time with the Commissar with us.”
He, however, was quite abruptly shoved out of the way by the rapidly approaching form of Colonel Fer-de-Lance. Blitzkrieg’s violent outburst of expletives was ignored as she all but threw herself upon me, wrapping her hooves around me in an embrace, and planted a kiss on each cheek in the Prench manner.
“A true soldier of Equestria has returned to us!” she exclaimed loudly, releasing me from the hug. A half-empty glass of wine floated close to her, and judging by the slurring of her words in excess of what was usual for her Prench accent, she’d already had quite a few by that point. My cheeks flushed red in embarrassment at the attention. “Ah, Prince Blueblood, your courage and honour is a shining beacon to us all! I knew that Chrysalis could not keep you from us. Here’s to many, many more victories to share!”
I would be lying if I said that I didn’t feel touched by the gesture, even if those ponies were ultimately misguided and my entire contribution to both escaping Changeling confinement several times and blowing up Operation: Sunburn was mostly due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In truth, the feeling that ponies would actually be pleased to see me, and genuinely so this time, was an odd one that I still have yet to get used to.
The rest of the party was spent with me regaling the other guests with what had happened, and though the tale I told was rather less sanitised than the stories I would tell to my fellow nobles in Canterlot, I naturally tweaked the narrative a little to make sure that I came out looking perfectly heroic. They didn’t need to know too much about how Fort Joy was actually rather pleasant, at least as far as prison camps went, and certainly my little dalliance with Square Basher was left between her, me, and now you. I almost, almost, felt happy to be back, until I recalled that once this little party was over, it was straight back to work, which meant even more mortal terror and blood.
The war had entered another ‘quiet period’, as the historians of today like to call it. Oh, ponies and Changelings still fought and died, but if the slaughter was to be plotted on a line graph then this particular moment would have been at a small valley next to two rather large peaks. Both Field Marshal Hardscrabble and General Market Garden had been very busy while I was away, and I’d missed out on quite a bit of bloody action. Look it up in a history book if you want all of the gory details, but suffice to say that the two sides had taken turns to bash against one another repeatedly, and now, as I stumbled back to divisional HQ with the apparent expectation that I’d simply return to my duties as though I’d merely taken a bit of time off for Hearth’s Warming, both sides had retreated to lick their wounds, glare menacingly at one another across the gulf of No Mare’s Land, and throw the occasional half-hearted punch to remind the other that there’s still a war going on. All the while, Princess Luna’s merry bands of partisans were up to all manner of mischief behind enemy lines, just as Chrysalis’ infiltrators would pop up every now and again to wreak havoc on our supply lines or disrupt a public holiday.
So on that alone, I suppose I could have counted myself lucky, but this was an even rarer instance of luck striking not just once, but thrice. While I was away being pampered at Camp Joy and almost burned alive again in Marelacca, there was an election of sorts. White Hall had been voted out and Fancy Pants was voted in, which resulted in something of a change of direction for the war effort. See, Field Marshal Hardscrabble had been very busy in the intervening time between my capture and my escape; he had hurled Market Garden’s First Army head-first into Chela’s war-swarms again and again with little in the way of appreciable gain, at least in terms of colouring portions of the map liberated by our gallant forces. The strategy of grinding down Chrysalis’ armies to the point where they could no longer resist was working, according to Hardscrabble, but the public, whose loved ones were being sacrificed upon that grim altar of war, had little stomach for the ever-growing casualty lists reported in the newspapers and made their displeasure known in the ballot box, at least those who could vote at the time.
I am ignorant of politics, among many things, but with regards to politics I do so wilfully. A prince is supposed to be above such things, aloof and regal, but it is impossible to remain truly isolated from its effects. After all, I’m merely one Commons vote away from losing everything, should they deem my stipend no longer worth it.
“Fancy Pants campaigned on finding a new way to end the war,” explained Hardscrabble, as he brought me up to speed on everything I’d missed over brandy and cigars. Well, I drank the brandy and he sipped warm apple juice; like many recovering alcoholics, he seemed to gain a sort of vicarious pleasure from watching others drink, and I was all too happy to oblige him. “The problem, sir, is that some ponies at home still believe that this war can be won quickly without bloodshed, even after Princess Twilight Sparkle’s reforms.”
“The numbers make for rather grim reading,” I said. It would be especially grim, I considered, if my name was to be added to those ever-lengthening lists. “To play Tirek’s Advocate, to be clear, can you truly fault them if they lose their stomach for war in this way?”
Hardscrabble frowned into his apple juice, which had been poured into a small whisky tumbler, and shook his head. “I know what they think of me,” he said, at length. “That I am throwing away lives with nothing to show for it. I do not waste lives, sir, I am no Iron Hoof. I spend them. Callous as that may seem, I have been brought in to bring a swift end to this war and that is what I am doing. To drag it out by fighting timidly and cautiously would only extend the suffering of ponies at the front, at home, and those still held in Changeling bondage. This war ends in only one way, sir—the complete destruction of Chrysalis’ swarms on the field, and nothing else will bring us the victory we seek.”
Now, in a twisted sense, he had a point. I did not particularly care for that point, but, I had to admit, there was a certain sense of cold logic to it. Lives as currency, the price one pays for victory, was the entire morbid calculation of war, and he seemed to prioritise speed over thrift on that account in the hope it would all balance out in our favour in the long run. It was enough to make me feel quite queasy, and not least because my life was very nearly ‘spent’ like that on several occasions, and would inevitably continue to rest in his metaphorical bank account for some time to come. Still, in truth, I have never thought Hardscrabble to be a truly callous general, not in the way that Iron Hoof was, despite his words. I believe, without much in the way of proof, mind you, but I like to think myself quite good at reading ponies to better manipulate them, that these losses affected him deeply, and that in this calculation he truly believed that this high tempo of operations would ultimately save lives in the long run. The truly psychotic commanders tended to be rather poor ones, and, thanks to the Commissariat, tended not to last long.
“And just how does Prime Minister Fancy Pants” -I felt even more nauseated saying that; one’s faith in the electorate drops with every election- “believe he can end this war, if not by fighting?”
Hardscrabble smirked, as if at a private joke. “By first negotiating. His official position is that Queen Chrysalis is not unreasonable and can be negotiated with.”
“He clearly has never met her.”
“That hasn’t stopped him. It’s only his official position, sir.”
“But Princess Celestia decreed that there can be no peace negotiation with the Hives while Chrysalis remains Queen,” I said grimly, nursing my snifter of brandy. It would be nice, I thought, to have a conversation with ponies that didn’t involve war, and thought to call upon Fine Vintage for an invigorating and detailed discussion about the merits of the ‘92 Neighpa Valley merlot versus the ‘93. “And the Changelings still seem terribly attached to their tyrant of a Queen, for some reason.”
“Precisely, sir,” he said, nodding as I spoke. “He knows this as well as you and I, but he must make those overtures to a negotiated peace to satisfy his campaign pledges, even if they are fruitless. Princess Celestia remains our Warmistress, and I have no doubt as to her commitment to our strategy. However, she must still bend to the fickle whims of her ponies, and that is what separates her from Chrysalis.”
“That’s all well and good,” I said; a break at the frontline was still a break nonetheless, and I could use that time to try and find a way to find myself promoted out of it. “But what does that mean for us?”
“There is to be a pause in the offensive, a bit of ‘breathing space’ to allow our battered forces and theirs to recover, before resuming the push, perhaps with a more limited goal.” Hardscrabble shrugged, but carried on fervently. “But I won’t dare keep the pressure off Chrysalis entirely. We are bleeding her, sir, bleeding her dry. Her best troops are arrayed against us, but they have only the old and the sick guarding their slaves and their occupied land, and soon they’ll not even have that. Then we will have our breakthrough. It will just take longer now.”
General Market Garden, however, saw it quite differently, when I finally summoned the wherewithal to call upon her. She had regarded my return with particular disinterest, as though my capture on her watch had nothing to do with her direction of the battle, which I found particularly galling.
“Oh, Blueblood, you’re back from your ‘holiday’,” she said, as though I’d merely waltzed in from a brief cruise in the Bahaymas, barely looking up from the various papers and maps on her map table (one that was still larger than Hardscrabble’s, as if to prove something). I almost expected her to ask me if I’d brought her anything.
As I understood it, Market Garden had received a not-inconsiderable amount of opprobrium, which might have explained her frosty reaction to my return, as though my capture and imprisonment had been my fault, just to annoy her. It would have been more convenient for her, perhaps, had I not returned at all.
“It was about time,” she said, once the other terse pleasantries had been dispensed with and she could speak about her favourite topic - what she had been doing. “The ponies are exhausted and our supply lines are stretched thin. They were thin before we even started this offensive and now they’re even thinner; single track roads in some places, with ponies and mules hauling wagons through bandit-infested country. Push them too far and they’ll snap, ponies and supply lines.”
I have to admit that I was quite surprised by her show of care to the poor souls under her command. Well, it was far more than what I was used to from any other general officer I’ve had the misfortune to meet.
“It’s my job to win this war,” she told me, with a truly enviable amount of self-assurance, “but it’s also my job to make sure there’s still an Equestrian Army by the end of it, that enough of our colts and fillies can go home.”
Judging by the sheer amount of paperwork on her desk, Market Garden had been far from idle during this ‘quiet’ period, and she had thrown herself into it with the same sort of fervour as one would expect from an all-out offensive. Planning, her favourite thing to do, had occupied her entire effort now, and just idly perusing the paperwork (she was also explaining it to me in excruciating detail, but her words merely passed through my ears without being registered at all by my brain) told me that she had something major in the works. The frontline had edged ever closer into the rotten, clogged heart of Chrysalis’ failing regime, and all of the great sweeping arrows on the maps pointed directly to one place: Teratoma Hive.
“The centre of Chrysalis’ war machine,” Market Garden explained, when I finally deigned to pay attention. “The Queen’s Hive might be its brain, but Teratoma Hive is where the weapons she cannot buy and steal are made. If we take that, then all resistance will crumble, but I tell you, Blueblood, it will be a brutal fight.” She smiled in an uneasily happy manner. “Fortunately, you have me in charge, and I’ll make sure that it’s done properly.”
I’d heard that before from her, and had earned the scars that proved otherwise. Nevertheless, I asked her if it was wise to be speaking so openly about her plans. Market Garden shrugged and pointed out that even though the enemy was always listening, it was patently obvious to anypony with more than two brain cells what her next target would be anyway. That intelligence wouldn’t help them, she assured me, as the force she was about to bear down upon Teratoma Hive would be nothing short of overwhelming. She was, if nothing else, perfectly predictable, and made up for that with the twin advantages of an obsession with planning and a fetish for truly excessive firepower. That, at least, gave me some measure of what I was now hell-bent on avoiding.
For the third instance of miraculous good fortune, this all happened to coincide with the time Major Starlit Skies had taken it upon himself to write a pamphlet, in between all of the violent slaughter, apparently, and said book had become something of a bestseller in my absence. This particular screed, titled ‘Harmony Tactics in Theory and Practice’, was one of those types of books that ponies had bought in droves but barely anypony outside of military circles had actually read, and was thus instead relegated to looking stately upon one’s bookcase. Indeed, it did look elegant, being a small, slim book tastefully bound in midnight blue cloth and with its title and author’s name printed in silver. He had gifted me a copy, signed by the author, when he stopped by for a friendly visit; his beady little eyes sparkling with delight behind his half-moon glasses as I opened to the first page to find Red Coat’s name listed first amongst the list of acknowledgements. Mine was fifth, after Princess Luna, his mother, and Colonel Sunshine Smiles, but I let that slide.
I didn’t read it, and still haven’t after all these years. I have far more edifying things to do with what limited time I have left on this world than to waste it reading a lengthy and dry treatise on finding more efficient ways of killing Changelings. Drinking and whoring, for one, which I did in abundance with the camp followers who always tag along on the heels of an advancing army. While there were plenty of pictures, they were all boring diagrams of military structure and battlefield manoeuvres, interspersed with far more maths than any book had a right to possess. Instead, I did as any sensible pony ought to have done and instead read what other ponies thought of the book, and I was rather surprised to find that those who did, Market Garden included, tended to have rather a high opinion of it. For those of you who remain unfamiliar with the work that revolutionised infantry tactics during the war and for reasons that I understand perfectly are not inclined to invest the time to change that, I shall do my best to summarise by what I can remember.
While Princess Twilight Sparkle had done a sterling job of reforming the Royal Guard into the Equestrian Army from the top down, unit tactics hadn’t changed much since that von Pferdwitz fellow, whose work I also hadn’t read, first put pen to parchment. Well, that’s not exactly true, of course, as they didn’t have muskets or teleporting runners back then [Unicorns have always used teleportation spells to relay messages quickly in battle since pre-unification days, but the reforms were the first to formalise them into an organised system], but the principle remained: the regiment, made up of companies each approximately one hundred strong on a good day and each of which consisted of ponies of one tribe, formed the basic tactical unit on the battlefield. This, Starlit Skies explained in his book and over lunch one day when I was forced to admit to him that I still hadn’t read it, was much too restrictive for the new technologies and larger armies of modern war, and hampered the ability for officers lower down the line to make decisions in response to developing situations. His theory ran that it was precisely this sort of rigidity and inflexibility that led to me being trapped atop Hill 70 in the first place.
Starlit Skies’ proposal was for greater integration of the three tribes into almost every layer of the military structure, right down to the platoon level. The idea behind this, as far as I could tell, was that this would allow for far greater flexibility for officers to adapt to and exploit changing developments on the battlefield. The other side of the metaphorical coin in this was that more independently-minded officers in charge of smaller, mixed units would require far greater and closer coordination between them, lest they all run off and do their own thing and the entire battle line falls apart. I wasn’t quite so sure about all of this myself, as the old Royal Guard that I knew seemed to think that officers leading their own units with any sense of autonomy at all was an inherently dangerous prospect that bordered on outright heresy, but I was, and still am, very much an amateur when it came to this sort of thing. It turned out that I was wrong on that account too, and the military establishment embraced that idea with the fervour of a recent convert to a cult. I suppose most of the old guard had either left or wisely shut up after Twilight Sparkle’s reforms went through.
“It’s merely an evolution of the old tactics,” he explained, and though I had confessed to not having read his book despite my repeated promises, he showed no sign of irritation or disappointment. “You remember your history, don’t you, young stallion? Your family were there marching with the Princesses as they conquered Equestria, and it was all three tribes working together that made the old Royal Guard such a potent force on the battlefield. Each tribe makes up for the others’ deficiencies on the field, supports one another, and so their efficacy is increased exponentially. And this relationship only becomes greater the more closely integrated the tribes become. That’s harmony at war. Of course, it means everypony has to get along, more or less.”
[This is a very brief but adequate summary of the so-called Harmony Tactics adopted by the Equestrians late into the war, of which Starlit Skies’ pamphlet was a key influence, but was mostly a summary of ad hoc changes to tactics and command structure that were already taking place. Blueblood has missed much of the nuance here, in particular the influence of native tribal warfare and their guerilla campaigns against Changeling occupation, which prioritised small, mobile units that would wear down large swarms with small but repeated attacks, as well as rapid developments in weapons technology, particularly musketry and artillery. Furthermore, the proposed changes were in large part a reaction to Hive Marshal Chela’s innovative tactics that did away with the massed, swarm tactics that had previously characterised the Changeling way of warfare. Although his description only skims the surface of Harmony Tactics, it will suffice for this particular entry in the memoir and requires no further elucidation on our part.]
Tactics don’t just change overnight, and the Guards Division, which had already been pushed through the wringer in those repeated attacks between that debacle on Hill 70 and my vaunted return to duty, was pulled from the frontline to rest and retrain around Fort Nowhere, which by that point had turned into something of a major logistics hub for the First Army. What had been little more than an ancient fort in which Diamond Dogs once squatted had become almost a small city in its own right, supporting the tracks of rail that brought ever more weapons, ammunition, food, water, and ponies to the front.
For me, however, as an independent commissar attached to the Guards Division, it meant a lot of paperwork and reports that, yes, the chap who dreamt up all of these ideas was implementing them correctly and what not. My days were largely spent in the manner that I had longed to ever since I unwillingly donned the commissar’s cap; safely ensconced behind a desk with only paperwork that I couldn’t delegate to somepony else, usually my aide Cannon Fodder, to do, aside from the occasional tedious meeting, and, most importantly, with nothing trying to kill me for once. I had plenty of free time to indulge, and while the environment lacked the sort of louche bars and refined gentlecolts’ clubs that I was used to in Canterlot, it still provided its fair share of adequate entertainment in the form of the officers’ mess, RASEA shows of varying entertainment value, and, as always follows an army on the march, mares of the night.
I mention all of this not because it’s interesting, it’s certainly not to me and most sane ponies out there, but merely to set the scene, as it were. For a time I was safe once more, but the war, impossible to truly escape from, was a dark cloud on the horizon that slowly but steadily loomed ever closer, and with each passing day it became more and more difficult to ignore. The reports that piled up ever higher on my desk, endless drivel about how well both the new recruits and the old veterans alike took to the new Harmony Tactics (barring the occasional inter-tribe falling-out that required me to intervene, get everypony sit in a circle, and teach them the importance of working together to kill Changelings), only made the inevitable more and more stark. I was running out of time to find a way to worm out of going back to the frontlines, and my requests to be promoted further up the chain, which I had assumed would be a sure thing considering I was effectively foal-sitting Market Garden already, had gotten nowhere. Ponies seemed to expect me to want to be close to the action, if not actively in it for whatever reason, and I could only assume had conveniently ignored my repeated requests for a comfortable office job a safe distance from the front.
Without a clear way out I threw myself further into diversions, in particular the aforementioned drinking, shows, and whoring. I must have put many sons and daughters of bartenders and prostitutes alike through college in those short weeks, and for that I hope they are very grateful. So when a particularly large diversion from the impending offensive swam into view, I seized it, and for that I would not only end up very nearly killed far from any frontline, but also uncover a rather unpleasant secret that I am still not allowed to speak openly about.
I’ve made my fondness of the Daring Do series of novels very plain over the years; they’re not things that a prince of my particularly lofty standing is supposed to enjoy, but I found that there is space for pulpy, escapist adventure stories alongside lewd Prench poetry and pretentious musings on the nature of Harmony and Friendship in one’s library. So when I learnt that A. K. Yearling herself would visit Fort Nowhere to read extracts from her latest book to the soldiers there as part of an RASEA show as well as accompany some manner of archaeological dig in the strange ruins beneath Fort Nowhere, I practically leapt at the chance to meet her.
It’s a very rare occurrence that I’m thoroughly starstruck; as usually it is I who has that effect on other ponies, it was a rather novel experience to be on the receiving end for once. I waited at the bustling train station just beyond the repaired walls of Fort Nowhere for her to arrive, alternating between sipping from my hipflask and anxiously puffing away at a cigar as I observed the trains coming every few minutes, laden with boxes of supplies that were unloaded by large teams of heavyset ponies and mules, and then carrying on to the next supply stop. It was from one such train that A. K. Yearling herself disembarked with her entourage, and though she was an unassuming kind of mare, the sort to blend into a crowd quite readily, she stood out spectacularly amidst the burly, sweaty loggies carrying heavy boxes of stuff around the station and swearing profusely as they did so.
Even then, I like to think I would have recognised her from the photographs in the dust jackets of her published works. I shouldn’t need to describe to whoever reads this what one of the most prolific and popular writers of my generation looks like, but I shall give you lucky readers my initial impression of her: she was a rather small, compact little pegasus mare with hunched shoulders, and appeared to be approaching the wrong end of middle age judging by the mane streaked with grey that peeked out from under her floppy grey hat. Her merlot cloak concealed much of her body, and despite the intense heat and humidity of the Badlands that turned my wool uniform into a sweat-soaked towel she didn’t seem to be suffering from it. As I approached, first tossing the remaining stub of my cigar away onto the train tracks, her sharp, rose-coloured eyes scrutinised me carefully from behind oversized glasses, and I felt more than a little bit like an interesting specimen under Twilight Sparkle’s microscope; it was probably just a writer’s thing, I assumed, as her sort must be constantly looking out for interesting ponies on which to base new characters and stories.
“Miss Yearling!” I said, barely capable of concealing my excitement. I felt like I was about to explode with glee; there she was, the A. K. Yearling standing before me! This must be how ordinary ponies feel when they meet me, I considered. “Welcome to Fort Nowhere.”
She looked me up and down with that same scrutinising stare, before apparently deciding that I was worth basic courtesy and smiled with a small but noticeable nod. “Prince Blueblood,” she said, rather tersely. I feared I might have insulted her, somehow, but it must have been a long and unpleasant journey here, thought I, especially crammed into a goods wagon for several hours. “Thank you, I wasn’t expecting a royal welcome.”
“I make a point to greet each of our honoured guests here when they arrive.” Well, just the ones that I like, at least. “The soldiers are very much looking forward to your reading, as am I.” My breath caught in my throat; I had something important to ask her, but the thought that it would be even more unbecoming of a prince to even consider it and that it might somehow annoy her almost stopped me, however, I feared that I would not have the chance to do so again. “I hope this isn’t too vulgar of me, but may I have your autograph?”
Her eyes widened in surprise, very briefly, but her peculiarly detached expression returned almost immediately. “I didn’t know you are a fan, sir,” she said, retrieving an elegant fountain pen from under her cloak, and as she did so I saw a glimpse of her body; from what little I saw, she looked a damned sight more athletic than her posture otherwise implied. If she lost the unfashionable cloak, hat, and glasses she might be very attractive for her age.
“My servants recommended it to me.” Blast, that was a stupid thing to say to her, and she was standing there expecting me to give her something to sign. I patted down my pockets with my magic, and realised that I’d left my old, dog-eared paperback of Daring Do and the Marked Thief of Marapore I’d selected specifically for her autograph next to my cot in my office. A moment of panic took me as I tried to find something, anything, that A. K. Yearling could sign for me. All that I had on me was a few sheets of folded paper, which, when I fished them out of my jacket pocket, I found was a draft copy of a letter to be distributed to the soldiers that I had to proof-read and expunge of anything liable to cause offence with some boring old prudes in Canterlot. It would have to do.
[This is likely a reference to an incident early in Market Garden’s career where she had distributed to the troops under her command a written warning against venereal disease and a reminder to use contraceptives when visiting prostitutes in the form of a risque limerick. While well-received among the soldiers, and indeed cases of venereal disease dropped after the pamphlet was distributed, it caused a minor controversy in Canterlot as the general seemed to be encouraging prostitution. However, she argued that soldiers will indulge in that particular activity in off-duty time regardless, and that they ought to do it safely to maintain combat effectiveness.]
She took the folded paper, and though her eyes widened as she glimpsed some of the possibly top-secret words on it, she scribbled her signature elegantly in an empty space in the corner and hoofed it back to me. Though I felt a little embarrassed, I reassured myself that it was unlikely to be the strangest thing that she had to sign before. Faust knows I’ve had some peculiar items and body parts thrust under my nose alongside a felt tip pen. Still, I would treasure it forever, and find a way to explain to Market Garden why I had a reclusive author’s autograph on her draft letter and why I had to keep it forever.
The loud, obnoxious sound of a pony clearing his throat to gain attention mercifully put an end to this awkwardness. I looked past A. K. Yearling to see a doddering older unicorn stallion just behind her, wearing a white shirt already stained with sweat and a paisley bow tie that was playfully askew. The sharp, bright light of the Badlands sun caused his coat to shimmer, and I realised he was a Crystal Pony, and likely very out of his depth in the sort of climate that was the precise opposite of his frigid homeland to the north. He hunched, and appeared to be almost embarrassed when I looked at him, all but shrinking away from my gaze. Behind him were a few other Crystal Ponies, also wearing what looked like a uniform of short-sleeve shirts, ties or bow ties, and pocket protectors stuffed with pens. Nerds, the lot of them. I felt a sudden urge that I had not felt since foalhood to shake them all down for lunch money.
“Sorry, everypony,” said the older stallion, with an almost pathetic amount of meekness and embarrassment. I nearly felt sorry for him, but that urge to dunk his head in a lavatory and flush was rising. “I’m Doctor Corded Ware,” he reached into his pocket and produced a crumpled, slightly damp piece of paper. “We’re with the Royal Archaeological Society of the Crystal Empire. Miss Yearling is going to help us with our dig under your fortress.”
“Oh, is it my fortress now? I have so many already.”
He coughed awkwardly at my silly attempt at humour, so I peered at the paper hovering before me in a deep purple aura and skim-read the words on it, and everything seemed to be in order. I might have spent a bit too long reading it just to make him and his colleagues sweat a bit more, before nodding approvingly.
“Yes, I was expecting you,” I said. “Looking for new material for your next book, Miss Yearling?” I could hardly contain my excitement; if I played my cards well, I could be treated to an advance copy of the story, read it before everypony else, and be the envy of the Commissariat’s book club.
“I’ll be providing Doctor Corded Ware with advice and technical support in the course of his investigation,” she said haughtily, and then added, “as well as looking for new material for my next book.”
I recalled that A. K. Yearling had earned a doctorate in archaeology in her youth, which always provided her novels with that extra sense of authenticity that separated it from the pretenders out there. I have to admit that I felt that minor sense of awkwardness a rich idiot like myself feels when in the presence of one’s intellectual superiors; I hadn’t even passed high school and I was standing before a group of rather clever ponies with many pieces of fine paper to prove it.
“I’ll show you to your rooms,” I said. “But first, hold still please.”
Though we were rather far from the frontlines, it never hurt to be too careful, especially when enemy infiltrators had been caught causing mayhem as far afield as Vanhoover and the Crystal Empire. So I zapped them each with the Changeling reveal spell. A. K. Yearling barely reacted, but the others flinched as though I’d splashed them with cold water, as the wave of dispelling magic washed over them. None of them were Changelings, which I found a little odd; the enemy, in spite of all of its tendrils in every aspect of Equestrian society, sometimes did a poor job of imitating ponies, and without a detailed description of a specific individual they would often rely on stereotypes that tend not to stand up to close scrutiny. We once caught a Changeling masquerading as a Prench pony in the Prism Guards, and it was the stripy shirt, beret, and the string of onions around his neck that gave it away. Yet standing here before me were a collection of classic nerds, complete with unfashionable glasses on some, hence my unbidden desire to bully them. I could only conclude that some cliches are in fact grounded in reality.
[It has been theorised that the infiltrators referenced by Blueblood were intended as diversions, to distract Equestrian security services from the more skilled drones infiltrating Equestrian society.]
I had hoped to spend some alone time with our true guest of honour, A. K. Yearling herself. Not only did I have a thousand questions about my favourite stories to ask her - how does Daring Do have time to go on adventures and curate a museum? How much does Daring Do really weigh? There seems to be more to Daring Do and Caballeron’s rivalry, did they ever have sex? - and so on, but, as we walked together and I noticed her athletic form move beneath that concealing cloak of hers, I saw that, despite her apparent age, she was still very attractive and clearly took care of herself, aside from the lack of make-up that I would imagine was due to a reclusive author such as herself not being supposed to care about such things.
It was Corded Ware, however, who monopolised much of my time in the walk to their rooms and in the meeting thereafter. His questions, announced in a reedy, nasal tone that grated on my nerves, were all about the battle that had taken place there a mere few years ago.
“It’s hard to imagine something like that happened here now,” said A. K. Yearling as we crossed the central courtyard to the keep. Indeed, the memories of that rainy, blood-soaked night, as ponies and Changelings slaughtered one another over the ground we walked upon, were still vivid in my mind as they still are now, and when I looked up at the forbidding sight of the keep looming above us I could not help but picture a certain nocturnal Auntie bellowing war-cries from its highest tower. Still, she was right; the courtyard had been paved over and the shattered walls that surrounded it had been rebuilt, stronger and thicker than before. Soldiers still drilled there, and this time it was the turn of the Prism Guards to march aimlessly up and down the square to the bellows of a Sergeant Major, while Lieutenant-Colonel Fer-de-Lance observed, imperiously sipping red wine from a crystal goblet throughout. The entire area looked so pristine and clean, but each time I blinked I could catch a glimpse in my mind of a ruined square littered with mutilated corpses.
“The reports said that the Changelings came up through the tunnels?” asked Corded Ware, as we passed through the main gates on our way from the train station.
“Yes,” I replied, though I was far from eager to relive that particular night. “While the main force assaulted the walls, another group infiltrated through the old tunnels under the fortress. We fought them off before they could take the keep.”
“And the Diamond Dogs?”
“Changelings as well.” There was still a fair bit of dispute about that in my mind; that the enemy would leave the entire place completely spotless, not to mention what that traumatised puppy tried to tell us, didn’t quite mesh with what I knew of the way Changelings do things. I like to think I have gained a fair bit of experience with that, though all of it was against my will. Then again, they were nothing if not unpredictable, at least early in the war when they still had leaders with both imagination and initiative, before Chrysalis had them all removed for lacking both loyalty and the means to bend reality to win her this war.
“They came up through the tunnels and killed the Diamond Dogs to lay a trap for the Royal Guard?” There was a current of scepticism in his voice; an academic such as he would be the sort to ask all manner of awkward questions that the military would rather not have answered.
“That is the official line, yes.”
“Is it safe?” asked one of the other archaeologists, one who, judging by his youth and the abundant spots on his face, was merely an intern of sorts.
As far as the Changelings went, nothing could ever truly be considered ‘safe’; the enemy still lurked in the shadows, ready to strike when our most stringent security lapsed even for a moment. Fort Nowhere was still a fortress, and the tunnels beneath it had remained sealed since that fight, but one could not discount the thought of a secret enemy mining operation that would take this vital artery in our tenuous supply line.
“Probably,” I said with a shrug, which only made him look even more worried. “We’re far from the frontlines, not that has ever stopped infiltrators, but we’ve had no indication that they’re using the tunnels to get in. The enemy prefer to hide themselves amongst the groups of poor refugees fleeing the fighting, the vile cowards.”
[The invasion of the Changeling Heartlands triggered a wave of refugees fleeing north to Equestria to escape the fighting, which provided the enemy with a route to infiltrate Equestria. Nevertheless, Equestria welcomed all fleeing the war with open hooves, and despite some political backlash, Changelings escaping Queen Chrysalis’ tyranny were afforded the same help and protection as ponies, with many joining Odonata in the Changeling Reconciliation And Progress group (later remained the Organisation for Changeling Liberation). Though he rarely mentioned it, Prince Blueblood opened his palaces to house refugees.]
“Perhaps you will join us?” said Corded Ware. “Just in case, and I’m sure you’re curious as to what’s really down there.”
Join a group of boring nerds poking around ancient, abandoned ruins that might be filled with Changelings? There were better ways for me to spend what limited time I had left before rejoining the fight, but, I considered, it would allow me to spend more time with A. K. Yearling here. I could have backed out there and then, and made an excuse about having some valuable work for the war effort to do and they would have accepted it at face value, but, damn him, Corded Ware was right. Part of me was intrigued about what really lay beneath my hooves, and what really happened to those Diamond Dogs. The thought of joining the author of my favourite series of stories since I was a colt in the closest thing approaching a real Daring Do adventure, only without the morally-bankrupt rivals, lethal traps, and ancient guardian spirits, was a terribly exciting one that the little wide-eyed foal in me could not resist.
“Of course,” I said. Besides, if something unfortunate was to happen to A. K. Yearling in those tunnels before she finished her next book, I would be hunted down by a mob of her adoring fans and promptly ripped into ribbons. I’d best make sure that didn’t come to pass.
Had I known the truth of what was hidden in those tunnels I’d have grabbed my sword, hijacked a cargo airship, flown straight back to Marelacca, and taken my chances with the resistance there instead.
I left A. K. Yearling, Corded Ware, and the other archaeologists to settle themselves into their quarters in the keep. The ancient interior had not escaped the renovation effort, and now served as a bustling records office for the Equestrian Army, ostensibly in support of all of the supply lines threading through the Badlands. However, though much of the old rooms and halls which had once housed long-dead ponies of worth aeons ago had been converted into offices, stationery store rooms, and the occasional barracks, a few were reserved for visiting guests, which our esteemed visitors now occupied, though they were unlikely to rank amongst the most luxurious hotels in Equestria. I myself had been granted the use of a tiny, square office to double as my quarters for the time there, just barely large enough to swing a dormouse, let alone a cat, while Cannon Fodder, in what I can only deduce was a deliberate joke, was assigned the much more spacious room adjacent to mine. However, though I could have ordered him to swap, he had already slept in it, and I was not willing the chance of picking up any one of his no doubt fascinating skin diseases.
That night, I invited A. K. Yearling to dinner in the officers’ mess and she accepted. I’d heard that the best way to ingratiate oneself with a writer is to feed them, rather like befriending dogs. However, either the archaeological team were under the mistaken impression that her invitation also extended to them or she had decided that dinner with just me was such a ghastly prospect that she invited them to join her and soften the experience, because after I’d spent about an hour changing into black tie, and fretting about whether or not it would be ostentatious of me to wear my medals (Drape Cut not being around to tell me what was correct made dressing myself rather more difficult), I popped down to the mess to find the staff grumbling about having to push some tables and chairs together because ‘that prince’ can’t count how many guests he’d invited.
Still, despite my manifest disappointment, I’d managed to secure a prime spot right next to the guest of honour, on her left, by staring down the spotty nerd who thought he’d grabbed the chair first. Corded Ware sat on her right side. I considered, perhaps, that it would not be so bad after all, and in the presence of her colleagues she would not feel quite so intimidated with the thought of sitting with a prince all evening. Still, I was rather surprised to find that they had blagged their way past the staff, who would otherwise have not normally allowed guests in such a state of undress through the velvet rope that separated that hallowed ground from the miserable world outside. I could only assume that they had given my name to the staff, who, and I like to think that I knew the keen and obsequious mind of the serving class quite well, would remember if these guests of mine misbehave and thus blame me.
Unfortunately for Yours Truly, all anypony else wanted to do was talk shop, and I soon gave up on attempting to follow the conversation. Archaeology, that is real archaeology, and not the fun adventures the very fictional Daring Do gets up to in her stories, is actually very boring. I only remember snippets of it, which were replete with confusing words and phrases that might as well have been in code for all I knew. After a while, I insisted on taking part, even if that meant making an idiot of myself, if out of spite at being ignored.
“According to Professor Pit Comb’s theories, the Crystal Empire’s outpost was built atop a more ancient Haygyptian necropolis, likely dating back to the reign of Pharaoh Hamon-Rei, that had been abandoned in the Late Pre-Classical Era,” said Corded Ware excitedly over a starter course of goat cheese tarts, spreading out an array of papers covered with diagrams and maps on the table to the consternation of the waiters. Our guests didn’t detect the slight raising of an eyebrow at that sight, but I certainly did. “Layers upon layers of civilisations, like a cake.”
“Pit Comb also suggested that the purpose of an outpost so far from the Crystal Empire was for trade with the pony tribes in the Badlands,” said A. K. Yearling. “But you think it must be something else?”
“Why would anypony build a trading post on top of a tomb?” he said with a shrug. “It just doesn’t make sense, but now the Crystal Empire is back we can finally have Crystal Ponies examining the site.”
“A necropolis?” I piped up, my interest finally piqued. “That sounds exciting. Is it cursed?”
“No, sir, curses aren’t real,” said Corded Ware, as one would to an annoying but well-meaning foal that one wasn’t allowed to slap into silence. Then, turning back to A. K. Yearling, he continued, “The length of time between its abandonment and its discovery by the Crystal Empire remains uncertain. It’s been difficult to estimate either from the written record alone, so it’s possible, but unlikely, that the Crystal Ponies didn’t know its purpose.”
“What about mummies?” I asked, quite innocently, I assure you.
Corded Ware leaned over and peered at me past A. K. Yearling, who was rolling her eyes and drinking with enthusiasm from her glass of white wine. “Yes, sir, there will likely be mummies in a Haygyptian necropolis,” he said. Before I could ask another daft question, he added, “No, they will not attack us, they have been dead for thousands of years.”
“Well, it happened in Daring Do and the Thousand Year Door.”
A. K. Yearling shot me a queer, rather intense look. “That’s fictional, sir,” she said. Her tail flicked, and I took that to be mere irritation or embarrassment.
They carried on with their dull chatter, and sometimes one of the other archaeologists would pipe up with a comment about something or other, interspersed with strange and arcane words like ‘amphora’, ‘seriation’, and ‘coprolite’. The main course, mushroom risotto again, came and went, and the wine I’d ordered went down all too agreeably, and by the time a fine dessert of creme brulee made an appearance I’d already polished off much of the bottle myself and was certainly feeling its effects. Clearly excluded from the conversation, either by choice as an outsider or simply because I was too uneducated and stupid to follow, I had allowed my mind to wander.
I hadn’t visited the keep’s dungeons since the battle, not having much opportunity or desire to even if they weren’t sealed by stone, but I certainly recalled vividly the memory of Twilight Sparkle discovering the chamber filled with those maddeningly chaotic pictograms. For once, Princess Celestia’s Most Faithful Student going off on a Twilecture was not the most immediately disturbing thing in the room, and though much of it could be attributed to my own battered mental state at the time, which hasn’t seen much in the way of improvement over the years, I still could not discount the eerie and unpleasant feeling I felt down there. I liked to think that I could shrug off such things, after all, at least two of my homes are purportedly the most haunted buildings in Equestria along with the Castle of the Two Sisters and the lavatories of my prep school if one believes in those old superstitions, but it was difficult to fully discount the distinctly unpleasant sensation I felt down there as being entirely in my own head.
This particular site had seen a great many civilisations occupying it over the long millennia, as I recalled, and Equestria was merely the latest in that long line; the Haygyptians were first to build what Twilight Sparkle had called a ‘temple-tomb complex’, whatever that meant, then the Crystal Empire moved in for whatever reason, then a tribe of ponies built a fort atop what was a convenient spot near a strategically vital area, and after a period of absence a pack of Diamond Dogs had turned the place into their den and were subsequently exterminated by the Changelings. A cake of civilisations, as Corded Ware put it. As I mulled this over in my head, and pretended to listen to what Corded Ware was droning on about something called hieratic script, something had occurred to me in such a striking manner that I could not help but blurt it out as though I’d made a fascinating discovery.
“Weren’t you there?” I asked, silencing their no-doubt fascinating discussion about ponies long dead. “Corded Ware, I mean,” I carried on, as everypony stared at me with perplexed expressions. “For the rest of the world, it has been thousands of years, but for the Crystal Ponies it’s only… what, when did the Empire return? A couple of years ago? Don’t you remember what this outpost was for?”
Corded Ware exchanged a few blank looks with his fellow archaeologists and A. K. Yearling, who was by now trying to shrink into her seat and hide behind her voluminous hat. “Sir, the Crystal Ponies were enslaved by King Sombra, if you recall. There’s very little of that time that we would want to remember.”
I’d well and truly stuck my hoof in it yet again, and then proceeded to smear it all over the walls and draw rude pictures. That, however, still just did not add up in my mind; they were clearly very clever ponies, and I assumed that one did not join an archaeological society on merely a good word and a recommendation from a friend. It would be safe to assume that even though they had been enslaved by Sombra’s evil regime, they were at least high-ranking serviles who presumably worked in some sort of civil service, rather like those clerks I’d encountered working for the Changelings in the fortress keep of Virion Hive, as opposed to the ones who mined crystals all day. However, this was supposed to be a polite dinner, not an inquisition, so I ignored the impulse to carry on questioning until I teased the truth, whatever that was, out of them. One could not be expected to recall the exact purpose of each and every single little outpost of what had been a vast and sprawling empire, I supposed.
I was no stranger to the social faux pas, and had some experience in smoothing them over. “Ah, sorry,” I said. “I’m merely eager to find out what’s down there. My family has a few ancient Crystal Empire artefacts in the vaults in the Sanguine Palace, ones that escaped the Empire’s disappearance and might pre-date the reign of Sombra himself. Artefacts of great artistry that hint at a fascinating culture before the rise of the tyrant. Perhaps, once this war is over, you might like to take a look at them? They’re merely gathering dust down there.”
That seemed to smooth things over somewhat, and the researchers carried on with their no-doubt fascinating discussion, leaving me to stew in mild embarrassment and wine. However, the mention of my family’s secret vault seemed to attract A. K. Yearling’s interest at last, and she finally deigned to speak with me.
“I’ve heard of the House of Blood’s vault,” she said. “You have the surviving cultural history of entire tribes and nations long vanished hidden under your palace.”
At first I thought she was speaking to somepony else, so she gave me a little nudge with her hoof to prompt me to answer. “As I said, gathering dust. A great many of my ancestors were inveterate hoarders, picking up whatever trinkets they could from wherever they travelled.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly. “They belong in a museum,” she said.
That old song and dance again; when somepony decides that I haven’t suffered enough minor irritations for one day they would make a noise about how I ought to return some of those items in the vault to whatever obscure tribe my ancestors had pilfered it from, and, frankly, I’m not terribly fussed about the contents of a part of the Sanguine Palace I’ve stepped inside perhaps twice in my entire life. The trouble, however, is that while I would be perfectly happy for them to take whatever it is that’s so valuable to them, and thus free up some extra space for one more wine cellar or what ponies these days call a ‘stallion cave’, another, more traditionally-minded member of my extended family would talk about how Great-Great-Great Uncle So-And-So had stolen it fair and square and that our family locking it away where no one can see and appreciate said artefact is actually preserving it. The two sides would argue for a bit, drawing in academics and the like to support their cases and perhaps somepony might threaten to sue or a duel might be fought, but ultimately nothing would happen at all and the status quo would continue until such a time somepony else decided to have a go.
“Yes, I agree,” I said, which seemed to surprise her a little. “At least some of the things down there ought not to belong to the family. We’ve yet to do a proper inventory of the vault, as the war’s getting in the way, and I’d imagine a few of the heirloom pieces down there might be quite dangerous. Who knows what enchantments Prince Coldblood’s codpiece might possess.”
A.K. Yearling paused, squinting at me, as if to try and figure out if I was joking about that or not (I wasn’t). “Are there any items that belonged to Princess Hotblood in there?”
“I have a few of her things down there,” I said. “I don’t recall what, exactly. Some letters, I believe, a few of her minor personal effects - I think one of them is a comb - and some bits of ceremonial armour, among other items that I can hardly remember.”
She stared at me, eyes wide in fascination as she listened to me list off the various bits and pieces that remained of one of Equestria’s ancient heroines as though they were merely collectibles that I had lying around the place. “Very little of the material culture around the Nightmare Heresy has survived,” she said. “Even less of the other alicorn princesses. To find anything that existed in that time that might shed light on what really happened back then is already an incredible achievement.”
“There are my aunts, of course,” I said, wondering why historians simply don’t go and ask either of the two immortal beings who were present for many of the key parts of Equestrian history. “I’m sure if you ask nicely, they’d be happy to acquiesce to a little chat about the ancient past.”
“Obtaining an interview with either princess is impossible,” she said, with the air of a pony who has tried repeatedly and failed. I would assume that even Auntie Celestia might be reluctant to speak of the most traumatic events of her life over and over again, as despite such things as being forced to banish her sister to the moon having occurred countless mortal lifetimes ago, alicorns have long memories to go with their long lifetimes. That, and considering that she had a country to run and a large celestial body that all life on Equus is dependent upon to look after, she might have just been too busy to answer such endless questions. [The other reason that I rarely give interviews is that I have already said as much as I can possibly remember about those historical events over the past centuries. However, I welcome those who might provide a unique perspective on a particular topic, and they should use the proper channels by writing a letter. Please do not attempt to do things like break into my bathroom to ask me questions about the Unicornian Reformation or the Fourth Pegasopolis Civil War while I’m bathing, as has happened in the past.]
“I might be able to put in a good word for you,” I said. “What is your interest in my long-dead ancestor, anyway? Looking for more material for a new book?”
“I’m always looking for more material,” she said, then hastened to add, “but not for a Daring Do story, this time.” She gave me another scrutinising look, and said in as polite a tone she can muster for such words: “It might not be for you.”
“Give me some credit, Miss Yearling, I can read other things too.” I smiled to show that I was only partially joking about that. “I’m well aware that you’re a real archaeologist, too, and I’d be quite interested to hear what you find out about my more famous ancestors.”
“I received a grant to write a paper on ancient alicorns, to sort the facts from the myths. An audience with the only two ponies who were alive at the time of the Nightmare Heresy would be very helpful, but not as helpful as examining the real material artefacts. And to think, it’s been sitting in your vault this entire time.”
[Part of the vault is now open to the general public, on days that the Sanguine Palace is open to visitors. There one can view not only ancient artefacts related to Blueblood’s ancestors, but items that belonged to Prince Blueblood himself, including his star spider silk vest, his collection of swords which includes his trusty sabre, and Slab.]
“I’ve had other priorities on my mind,” I said. “Fighting a war, for one, but I’m sure victory would bring many opportunities for such talented researchers such as yourself and your colleagues to take a look around the contents of the vault.” Few things helped boost a royal’s standing in the eyes of the public, aside from a particularly saucy scandal where one comes out on top or, as I’ve demonstrated, being seen as a war hero, like patronising academics. I suppose it helps one make up for one’s own lack of intelligence and education to invest in that of others, while reaping some measure of the praise without having to do much more than write a cheque and make occasional inquiries to ensure it’s not being spent on more personally edifying things like drinking.
The prospect of poking around in a large, sprawling, underground dungeon filled to the brim with all manner of very old things seemed to get A. K. Yearling to finally warm up to me. We carried on chatting, even as the nerds around the table realised it was past their bedtimes and slinked off one by one, about the sorts of things that I have squirrelled away in the family vaults. At least, I spoke of the things that I could remember were down there, like Coldblood’s favourite scalpel and his collection of as-yet-unopened poisons. Some things I might have embellished a little, but I trusted that whatever else she found down there would surpass her expectations. I understood, at last, that perhaps she was rather tired of everypony asking about her Daring Do books, rather like me with my military service albeit much less traumatic and nightmare-inducing for her, and for once wished that ponies would speak to her about her true passion: archaeology and things belonging to ponies who have been dead for thousands of years (and the two ponies who have been alive for thousands of years, of course). I like to think that I was far from the most annoying fan she’s ever met, because I’ve met a few myself whom I’ve considered having locked up for the crime of correcting a prince on matters of Daring Do lore, at least until my drinking that night inevitably brought me across that threshold again. The wine was finished, and we’d moved onto the port and cigars - well, I smoked, and Miss Yearling declined on that account.
We stayed quite late, and the mess had cleared of all except those most dedicated to the Bacchanalian pursuits and those who had fallen asleep at their tables, and I did what I always do in the company of an attractive mare and invited her up to my quarters to continue the discussion. Now, keep in mind that by that point I was quite drunk, and she was, at most, a little tipsy; I could approximate walking in a straight line and speak in what I thought at the time were coherent sentences, but as ever, I thought it best to keep going and hope that I wouldn’t disgrace myself too much.
Though it was very dark by the time A. K. Yearling and I emerged from the officers' mess, the frantic activity in Fort Nowhere had scarcely quietened down. The monumental effort to build up the necessary supplies for Market Garden’s next Big Push could not wait for such things as darkness and normal sleeping patterns, and ponies on the night shift continued to labour loading and unloading those supplies. Night and day the interminable toil proceeded, only lessening somewhat with the setting of the sun; at least the noise of the trains coming and going gave me an excuse for the lack of sleep, besides the habitual nightmares of all that I have endured in this war thus far.
“You know, I used to try writing my own Daring Do stories,” I said, as I invited her into my quarters. Even though I was quite drunk, it was not lost on me that she did not look particularly comfortable and I wondered if I’d overstepped the mark considerably. In truth, I don’t entirely recall my intentions that night; I might have thought to seduce her but decided against it, or perhaps I merely wanted to continue our interesting discussion without the mess staff glaring at us and tapping their watches. In an odd way, I suppose, fans come to think of themselves as knowing the creators of their favourite works, to form something of a twisted, one-sided ‘friendship’ of sorts with them.
As I lit a few candles to bring a little light into the rather gloomy chamber that I called my mercifully temporary home, I saw the same expression on her that one sees on Rainbow Dash just as she discovers that the cider has run out. She collected herself quickly. “Fanfiction?” she asked.
“I suppose one could call it that,” I said. “Foalhood scribblings, really. Daring Do whisks a young prince away from a life of royal drudgery for fun adventures. Hardly high literature, but it kept my spirits up when my parents confiscated my book collection after they decided it was beneath our noble rank. I don’t think any of them survived after they found out about it, but I have a few that I can still remember, more or less.”
“It’s not a good idea for authors to read fanfiction,” she said, her voice quite stilted and awkward. “Or hear about it. It leads to all sorts of legal problems that I’d rather not get into.”
“Oh, come now, I wouldn't dream of suing you.” Or anypony, for that matter; such problems were best sorted out on the field of honour than in court. Still, I could tell that I was making her more uncomfortable, though, my instincts, clouded by drink though they might have been, told me that there was something else occupying her mind. I put it down to the no doubt difficult task of researching and writing her next book, and while I have only written one book in my life, a gentlecolt’s guide to the best brothels and bordello that Prance has to offer the young stag on the Grand Tour, besides these lengthy ramblings here, I could imagine that there was quite a bit of work involved in writing real literature. “What I mean is that your stories provided a measure of… escape for a certain young colt trapped in a world of rigid royal expectations.”
She gave me that odd look again. I had overstepped the mark, so I tried to ease the situation a little by opening up my fully-stocked drinks cabinet and offering her a nightcap.
“No, thank you, I’ve had quite enough,” she said, though I was uncertain whether she meant of the drink or of me. However, that she hadn’t run off already implied it was more the former, and I decided that I’d probably had enough too and shut the cabinet. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought that she was trying to tell me something rather important, to her at least, but hadn’t quite summoned the necessary courage or found the correct words to do so, which must have been quite worrying for a writer.
“Blueblood.” A. K. Yearling still stood at the threshold of my door, with only the tip of her snout crossing it, apparently struggling to make up her mind about whether or not to commit to entering. To say that her behaviour was peculiar would be to undersell it, and at first I simply put it down to the reclusive writer possessing the social skills of a baked potato, but even through my drunken haze I could understand that there was something else at the root of this. So peculiar, in fact, that her omission of my royal title barely offended my regal temperament.
In the end, however, she gave up on it. “Good night,” she said, with a slight bow of her head, “we’ll start the preparations for the excavation tomorrow. I look forward to working with you.”
***
I was determined to put the strange incident out of mind, and in the morning, after another night of restless sleep and while nursing a particularly unpleasant hangover, I had more immediate problems to contend with. Nothing life-threatening, at least not yet, but irritating nonetheless. A. K. Yearling and Corded Ware were up early and busied themselves organising the excavation; I found them in one of the smaller conference rooms in the keep, pouring over maps and diagrams and chatting excitedly about what they hoped to find down there. I stayed a short while, just long enough to remind myself that archaeology was a little more involved than merely digging a big hole and seeing what things you can find down there, and I left them to get on with it. If Miss Yearling seemed at all perturbed by the little social disaster that took place the night before, she made no sign, aside from being about as distant as she was when I first met her.
However, as I made my rounds that morning with Cannon Fodder, reminding everypony that I still exist and pretending that I have a real job to do, what should have been a routine stroll around the camp before retreating back into my room for a well-deserved nap was rudely interrupted by one of the archaeologists having an altercation with that irritating bureaucrat Pencil Pusher. I could already hear raised voices in the corridor, and I knew that this morning’s walk was not going to be as dull, tedious, and uneventful as I’d hoped. Perhaps I could have pretended that I never heard it, however, I recognised Pencil Pusher’s clipped, insufferably smug tone, which had become a little high and squeaky being raised, quickly followed by the more nasal tone of one of the archaeologists, and I knew that I had to put an end to whatever mess he was in the process of making before it would develop into a more severe problem. I trotted onwards, Cannon Fodder behind me and making an awful racket with his armour as he followed, before this could develop into a larger problem that would require even more of my incredibly valuable time and effort to deal with.
Throwing the door to the small store room open with excessive force had the desired effect of silencing the argument. Pencil Pusher nearly jumped out of his neatly-pressed service uniform in shock. There were a few crates in this windowless store room, which was inadequately lit by a small lamp hanging from the ceiling. The esteemed quartermaster was accompanied and dwarfed by two burly stallions who worked in the regimental stores, who I presume he’d brought along for muscle, in case the thin, reedy fellow from the Crystal Pony archaeology group took all leave of his senses and decided to resort to violence. Still, having been subjected to the quartermaster’s single-minded dedication to the rules at the exclusion of all sense and logic, I could very well understand if this researcher responded to whatever questioning being inflicted upon him with brutal violence. It would be funny to watch, I considered as I surveyed the scene.
“Ah, Commissar!” exclaimed Pencil Pusher, his voice rather squeaky as he tried to collect himself. “I was about to send somepony to fetch you! I simply cannot work under these conditions.”
“What is it this time?” I snapped; it was best to cut to the heart of the matter with these sorts of things.
Pencil Pusher cleared his throat noisily and smoothed down the front of his already-pristine uniform. I noticed that he was brandishing a crowbar, which floated awkwardly besides his head in his grey aura. “This civilian is refusing to allow us to check the contents of these boxes!” he said, his voice petulant like that of a foal complaining his friend refuses to share. “Regulations state that all shipping must be examined by approved personnel before they can be stored on a military site.”
As much as it pained me to admit it, Pencil Pusher was in the right on this matter; letting anypony store whatever they wanted in a military supply depot was just asking for all sorts of trouble, and, now that it had been pointed out to me, I was very curious to know what was inside the box that the archaeologists didn’t want us seeing. “What’s in the box?” I asked.
“No idea,” said Pencil Pusher.
“Not you.” I approached the archaeologist, who flinched from me as though I was menacing him with a large sledgehammer. “What’s in the box?” I repeated.
“Archaeological equipment!” he said, a little too quickly for my liking. Granted, he could just have been nervous, and indeed he certainly looked it, but whether he was nervous purely because of the tall, scary commissar-prince with skulls on his uniform or because he had something to hide remained to be seen.
“Then you won’t mind us taking a look?” I said.
“I-” He looked left and right, as though trying to find a way to dart around me and escape out through the door. “I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Why not? Is it dangerous?”
“No, sir!”
“Then surely if it’s only ‘archaeological equipment’, whatever that might be, then there’s no harm in letting Pencil Pusher here do his job?”
“Well, no, I guess not, sir.” The archaeologist chap pawed at the ground and lowered his head, but his ears were still pricked up with worry. “But this is highly sensitive archaeological equipment. You might break it.”
Pencil Pusher scoffed, apparently insulted. “I deal with equipment that our soldiers depend on with their lives every single day. I think I can handle a few… what’s in there anyway, spades for digging?”
“No, no, it’s much more complicated than that. It’s, uh, magic.”
One did not need to be a master detective to know that he was hiding something in those boxes, and for once I was in the rare situation of siding with Pencil Pusher here. My interest piqued, I wanted more than anything to find out what was inside that box and why this bespectacled little nerd was so adamant that I should not know its contents. More than that, I was also a little insulted that he thought he could get past me with such a blatant lie, and if me being ostensibly an adult and the social mores that came with it forbade me from grabbing him by his hindlegs and shaking him upside down until he caved in, then I would have to satiate my bullying urges through merely embarrassing him.
“Open it,” I ordered.
“But-”
“This is a military site,” I said, “and we are at war. Everything that comes here must be inspected for contraband. We’re opening the box, and if, as you say, everything inside is perfectly safe and harmless, then you have nothing to fear from a little inspection. Unless, you are trying to hide something?”
Trapped by my unassailable logic, the archaeologist could only say, “We have nothing to hide, sir!”
“Then you won’t mind us having a look inside.”
Pencil Pusher grinned with such a smug little smile at his minor victory that I briefly considered withdrawing that order, but it was best to let him have his little moment of glory. The archaeologist started to protest with incoherent mutterings about just how delicate the contents of the box were, but I silenced him with the number four stern look, and he wisely shut up and stepped back, head bowed, as the regimental quartermaster raised his crowbar and thrust the pointy end into the thin gap between the lid and the box itself.
“I assure you, the soldiers of the Night Guards are consummate professionals,” I said, in what was probably the greatest lie that I had ever uttered in my entire career. “If there is any damage to the equipment inside, we will compensate you and your team.” Out of Pencil Pusher’s wages, I mentally added.
The cheap wood made an ominous creaking noise as Pencil Pusher applied pressure to the crowbar, and the lid began to lift free from the box with loud snaps of breaking nails that reminded me of distant musket volleys. Before the lid was off, I could see the malignant green glow of whatever was inside, and it poured out into the room like a miasma. With a final burst of effort, the top was torn clean off, revealing the contents that our nerd friend here had thought he could get away with smuggling inside our camp.
“What the bloody hell?” exclaimed Pencil Pusher, as he handed his prized crowbar to one of his very bored-looking underlings. He peered down into the open crate with an expression that was equal parts curiosity, confusion, and wariness at its contents.
“I can explain,” said the archaeologist, but rather than follow through with that assertion, he merely let it hang in the air like Cannon Fodder’s odour after consuming a large bowl of baked beans.
Gripped by that same curiosity, I stepped closer to peer inside the crate. There, piled up in a rather haphazard way, either through the carelessness of the pony who packed it or that of the ponies who transported it here, were glowing crystals, each roughly the size of my hoof. They were approximately spherical, but certainly not uniform in exact shape or size, with several appearing to be shaped rather more like eggs or melons. Each, however, glowed from within with a peculiar green light, and with the lid off I could feel the magic radiating off of it. This being another time where I wished I’d paid more attention in magic class instead of drawing pictures of genitals in the air with magic to upset Twilight Sparkle, I couldn’t place it, but nevertheless it felt strange and unnatural, unlike any magic that I’d felt before. It set my teeth on edge, and I could feel something tingling just on the end of my horn, just barely at the crest of perception.
“Strange-looking shovels,” I said. Against my better judgement, I reached inside with my hoof to touch one of them.
“Please don’t touch them, sir,” said the archaeologist, twitching with anxiety. “They’re fragile.”
I withdrew my hoof. “Fine,” I snapped, “but I demand the truth. What are they?”
“Like I said, sir, archaeological equipment,” he said, and when I gradually raised my eyebrow in growing disbelief at his brazenness of maintaining the obvious lie, he launched into a panicked explanation that came out as a stream of words. “They, uh, detect concentrations of ancient Crystal Empire magic! They’re very rare and very old, predating King Sombra’s reign, which is why you mustn’t touch them as the slightest misalignment could break them irreparably! They’re completely harmless, I assure you!”
Now, call me suspicious if you will, and I’ve been called far worse before, but I didn’t quite believe him. However, I didn’t have much in the way of real evidence to call his claims into question, besides a general feeling that this didn’t really add up, and I was willing to give the poor chap a little bit of leeway on that account. He certainly seemed agitated, but that could just as readily be explained by Yours Truly in a scary uniform interrogating him in a darkened room. The previous night’s discussion had already made me feel a little on the stupid side, and I didn’t fancy making myself look even more of an idiot in the eyes of our learned guests yet again.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” insisted Pencil Pusher. “In accordance with the regulations, I shall be impounding these… whatever they are. They will be returned to you once I am satisfied that they are ‘completely harmless’.”
In truth, I was about to let it slide. After all, this had wasted enough of my valuable time, which I might have otherwise spent brushing up on Crystal Empire history so as not to embarrass myself in front of its esteemed researchers again, and I was quite willing to let the Crystal Ponies have their weird magic things, even if I didn’t entirely trust them. However, this particular nerd’s subsequent response to Pencil Pusher’s rather harsh but understandable ruling was what tipped my compass from just letting it go to realising that there was far more to these strange little spheroids than he said.
“No!” he exclaimed, lunging forward to position himself in between his prized glowing spheres and Pencil Pusher, who still brandished his crowbar in what he probably thought was a menacing pose. “You can’t!”
“Why not?” I asked. “If they are completely harmless, as you say, then you have nothing to fear and nothing to hide. Unless, there is something you’re hiding?”
My irresistible logic had once again pinned him into a metaphorical corner, and he stood there, jaw flapping wordlessly and uselessly as he tried to come up with some sort of counter that would make all of this unpleasantness disappear. I have to admit that the bully within me enjoyed watching him squirm. However, it was as he began to stammer out an excuse of sorts that Cannon Fodder, who had merely been hovering silently in his usual position just behind me and to the left, was finally taken by that same sense of curiosity about what all the fuss was about. My magically-inert aide approached the crate full of these glowing orbs, and as he stepped closer, the eldritch green luminescence within each flickered, sputtered, and then died, to leave a crate full of inert, dull crystal globes.
A plaintive ‘Oh no’ was all that the archaeologist could muster.
***
“Sir, this is completely unacceptable!” snapped Corded Ware. He had evidently found out about what had happened with his ‘archaeological equipment’, and I assumed that his embarrassed and distraught colleague had told him. He found me in my office, where I had spent the afternoon sleeping off a rather heavy and boozy lunch with Captain Fine Vintage. “Those orbs were extremely valuable, and your soldiers, who obviously have no respect for the past and clearly cannot read signs, opened them.”
“I’ll ignore your disrespectful tone for now,” I said, thoroughly annoyed at having been woken from my nap. I’d managed to convince the other archaeologist that the contents of the crate must have been damaged when Pencil Pusher opened the box with his crowbar, and that clearly Cannon Fodder had nothing to do with it. Though his unique ‘gift’ was gradually becoming common knowledge, I still made an effort to keep his rare condition as much a secret as I possibly still could. “Perhaps it has escaped your notice that we are at war right now, and you and your team are here only on the sufferance of Their Royal Highnesses’ Equestrian Army. It can be very easily taken away. I have but to give one order and you will all be sent back to the Crystal Empire with nothing to show for it.”
“This expedition is funded by the Crystal Princess,” he sneered. “What will I say when I tell her you are obstructing our work here?”
“You might know her as Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, but I know her as my cousin Cadance,” I retorted; it was always silly when ponies tried to name-drop other members of royalty with me, as if I wasn’t related to most of them. “While you are here you are subject to military law, and I’ll not have members of your team interfering with their work. Pencil Pusher was correct, and perhaps if your colleague had shown due deference to his authority we might have avoided the damage. All goods, whatever they are, brought into this fortress must be checked thoroughly, or have you forgotten that we fight an enemy that changes its form at will?”
Corded Ware snorted; he was clearly angry, but even considering the loss of those apparently irreplaceable orbs, his anger seemed disproportionate. Granted, that might have been due to Yours Truly not particularly caring about the field of archaeology, or that he was clearly in the wrong here and had, as many rather prideful ponies including me do, decided that rather than surrendering to common sense he would instead commit more fully into his wrong-headed argument. “We are on the very cusp of discovering something spectacular, sir, and your soldiers are getting in the way of that.”
“And whatever it is you hope to find down there will still be there after this war is over,” I said. “What’s so important in that crypt that it can’t wait until after Queen Chrysalis has been vanquished?”
“Our history, sir.” Corded Ware’s voice took on a more pleading tone, clearing hoping that if logic wouldn’t sway me, then attempting to evoke sympathy would. “So much of our past has been lost over the millennia. We Crystal Ponies find ourselves in a new, strange world we no longer recognise or feel a part of. Finding what our ancestors did before King Sombra may help us reconnect with the world, and why we should bother fighting for it.”
I could have sent him and his fellow nerds home, and I was very tempted; they were becoming more than a mere nuisance, and that incident had set the paranoid part of my mind into a veritable flurry of frantic conjecture on just what they were up to. However, that would also have upset A. K. Yearling, and that was what nudged me into relenting. “Very well,” I said. “But you must cooperate with the authorities here, or you’ll be on the first train home. Is that clear?”
The preparations for the upcoming excavation continued with about the same effort for Market Garden’s next offensive, and as the days wore on, the two would continue to interfere with one another to an irritating degree. Still, it kept me busy, and sorting out minor irritations like an archaeologist getting lost in the fortress and accidentally wandering into the General’s office where she kept her top secret documents gave me at least some excuse to get away from the more serious work, where my decisions could affect the outcomes of battles to come and the lives of everypony involved.
[As an unfortunate consequence of the war dragging on, particularly with Hardscrabble's new strategic doctrine in place, several ponies were arrested as Changeling sympathisers for committing acts ranging from vandalising government property to attempted espionage. The Commissariat's job was to clamp down on such dissent within the military, and though Blueblood's glossing over this incident may seem odd, it is likely a reflection of his disdain for the supposed overreaction of those around him, and the encounter was still documented in official records. Since an application of the Changeling reveal spell would not be sufficient, Blueblood conducted a brief interrogation, in which a bottle of brandy was involved, concluding with the suspect's prompt release.]
The incident with those strange glowing orbs continued to nag at me like an itch in a hard-to-reach place; far be it from me to think that my silly paranoia trumps the intelligence and experience of highly trained and well-educated academics, but said instinctive distrust has kept me alive these past few years of war and that it persisted in quietly poking me in the the back of my brain with a stick inclined me to think that there really was something more to them. However, they were gone now, having been rendered useless by Cannon Fodder, so it was something of a moot point. That said, the first rule of paranoia is that when somepony else goes to great lengths to conceal something from ordinary, routine scrutiny, then it is usually only the first time that they have been caught in the act and they are likely to be hiding a great many other things. I was determined to find out, but if I did the usual commissar routine of shouting at everypony and threatening firing squads until somepony cracked and told the truth, then they would have simply gone home and I’d be left wondering what that was all about, and so I would have to tread somewhat carefully. In practice, this meant going along with whatever it was they were doing, while keeping an eye out for the inevitable denouement.
As for A. K. Yearling, if I didn’t know any better I’d have said that she was avoiding me. That is not to say that she was outright rude or hostile to Yours Truly, but whatever bond we had formed over that dinner had clearly been broken prematurely by the peculiar incident right after. Each time that I saw her since now involved merely an exchange of pleasantries and a spot of chatter about the upcoming dig, and I made sure to resist the persistent urge to pester her with yet more questions about her Daring Do stories. Perhaps, I considered, it was better to maintain a level of professional distance, at least until the excavation was finally complete. I attended, and was thoroughly bored by, a number of meetings where they planned the excavation in as much detail as possible. Market Garden, I thought, would have been very impressed, and A. K. Yearling might have missed her opportunity to do her part for the war effort by serving on the General’s staff as the chief orderly in charge of counting staplers.
In one such meeting Southern Cross was in attendance, and was likewise bored to tears by the goings-on. As A. K. Yearling and Corded Ware went on and on about something or other to do with dating early and late Crystal Empire pottery, the two of us sat at our corner of the conference table quietly playing noughts-and-crosses on the meeting notes to try and pass the time. I lost three games in a row and Southern Cross grinned with insufferable smugness, but he could not gloat in his victory for long when it finally came to the part of this overly-long and tedious meeting that required his presence.
“Captain Southern Cross,” said Corded Ware, and said engineer looked up with a start from where he was doodling a constellation next to the site of my most ignominious defeat in our battle of wits.
“Yeah, mate?” he answered, suppressing a yawn at the same time so that he sounded like a drunk slurring his words.
“How long will it be until the blockage is cleared?”
“A couple more days,” said Southern Cross with a shrug. “Only because we did such a good job of blocking it in the first place; nopony here wants Changelings coming up through their basement again.”
Corded Ware frowned and shook his head. “Could you not speed it up?”
“We could.” A small smirk formed on Southern Cross’ mouth, as it tended to do before he had something he thought was clever to say. “We could do it in a day, and wreck all of the very old stuff in the basement that by rights probably ought to be preserved. What’s left of it, I mean. We’re engineers, mate, you can have us do things quickly or do things properly, but not both at the same time.”
He spoke of the tomb’s entrance chamber beneath the fortress’ keep, a few storeys down directly under our hooves, that had been the way inside the ‘temple-tomb complex’ that remained unexplored, except perhaps by a band of Diamond Dogs and the Changelings that had allegedly wiped them all out. It was ancient, yes, and had been repurposed as a dungeon and torture chamber by the Badlands pony tribe that had later occupied and then abandoned this fortress atop it, yet the desperately old carvings that predated Equestria’s founding by untold millennia had remained more or less intact. It had survived the many thousands of years since, until our sappers were forced to demolish a large section of it with explosives to stop the enemy from coming up through those same tunnels during the siege here. A great loss to the world of archaeology, of course, but given the rather desperate circumstances we found ourselves in during that awful battle, an acceptable one. Following that, subsequent teams of engineers had worked to seal off the tunnels as securely as possible, and now all of that needed to be undone so Corded Ware and company could go poking around below.
“I’d like to avoid further damage to the site,” said A. K. Yearling. “If it can be avoided.”
“We’re here for the old Crystal Empire outpost,” said Corded Ware, irritation starting to colour his face and expression. However, he then collected himself and sighed. “How quickly can you clear it?”
Southern Cross frowned, squinting at the old archaeologist, and took a sharp intake of breath, as labouring ponies do when somepony asks them to do something unwise but they can’t just say it. “I can always ‘speed up’. Send in the stallions with pick axes and hack through all the rubble and thousand-year-old masonry with fancy carvings. We can do it all in a day if we don’t care about damaging all of that irreplaceable stuff, if that’s what you really want?”
I could see the expression of dawning horror develop in slow-motion on A. K. Yearling’s face, and Corded Ware squirmed awkwardly in his seat. “The entire purpose of this excavation,” he began, “is to uncover the Crystal Empire outpost. Everything else is secondary.”
A. K. Yearling shot her colleague a sharp glare, and looked as though she was restraining herself from leaping over the table and slapping him. Southern Cross appeared not to know how to respond to that, and merely shrugged casually and muttered something quietly to himself about this entire meeting being pointless.
“That,” I said, and everypony snapped to look at me as I said my first words in the meeting that weren’t the usual opening pleasantries or an inquiry about whether or not we’ll be served biscuits soon, “is a very strange attitude for an archaeologist to have.”
My suspicions about the stallion sitting opposite me were only growing more aroused by his odd behaviour. Of course, he was an academic, and ponies who spend their entire lives immersed in books and fussing over others who are long dead are very odd by their nature anyway, like a certain purple Princess I could name. There was more to him and his little band of fellow geeks than their appearances, which were simply too stereotypical to be believable but I suppose such cliches have some grounding in reality, would otherwise have implied, but all that I had by way of evidence were a few odd things that would hardly stand up in any sort of tribunal except one where I had bribed the judge.
“What’s the rush?” I asked, while he continued to brood silently to try and come up with some sort of answer that, I assumed, would make me shut up. “Surely whatever’s down there is unlikely to walk away?”
He quickly realised that he had overstepped the mark, or that his cover had slipped, as the paranoid part of my brain hastened to correct. “Of course,” he said, looking and sounding very sheepish all of a sudden. “Forgive me, the ancient Crystal Empire has been my life’s work. I’m glad I have colleagues to ensure that my pursuits do not blind me from the principles of archaeological research.”
I remained unconvinced by that, but interrogating him on this point and thereby dragging out this meeting seemed like a waste of my valuable and limited time, and there was a seat at the bar in the mess with my name on it just waiting for me. All I could do, aside from drag him to one side and threaten him with a flogging if he didn’t give up all of his secrets, was go along with it. There was, I reassured myself, always the possibility, however remote, that it could all be very innocent. I’d learnt by now to trust my instincts, but I had made the fatal assumption that such things applied exclusively to matters of war and that the warning signs were merely them being misapplied to a group of socially-backward bookworms instead of the sort of socially-backward officers I was used to working with, and so, in the name of just getting on with it, I put it all to one side. This felt more and more like a Daring Do story by the second, and not one of the better ones too; I half-expected the door to burst open and Caballeron to storm in with his henchponies because the author had written herself into a corner and needed to move the plot along. I reminded myself that this sort of thing was fictional, as said author herself had explained, and that the reality of archaeology was much more tedious, sedate, and safe than otherwise implied. Besides, I didn’t fancy looking like a complete idiot again after that debacle at dinner a few nights ago.
The meeting came to a gradual but greatly anticipated conclusion, for my backside had become numb after sitting still for so long and I was feeling rather restless. Southern Cross agreed that the blockage could be at least partially cleared within a few days, preserving what was left of the ancient carved walls and pillars for posterity while allowing sufficient space for a team of ponies to slip through with relative ease. This satisfied A. K. Yearling, and though Corded Ware sulked like a foal denied more ice cream, he glumly acknowledged defeat and nodded his agreement to the plan.
That evening, A. K. Yearling delivered on her promise to read a chapter from her greatly-anticipated next book, Daring Do and the Forbidden City of Clouds, for the soldiers as part of an RASEA show, and I felt rather sorry for the comedy juggling act that was to follow immediately. Now, I’ve attended a great many of these shows before, as often on the frontline there’s not much else in the way of entertainment besides drowning one’s sorrows in liquor or seeking the comfort granted by hiring the services of another pony for the night, and both of which were, if accepted, at least somewhat frowned upon if done to excess. I had yet to see a show with such an attentive audience as her’s. They tended to be rather raucous affairs, you see, since the audience was made up of very bored young stallions and mares whose jobs entailed no small amount of personal risk to themselves, and as such all shows were audience-participation numbers regardless of the intentions of whichever unfortunate entertainer was hauled out in front of them for their amusement. The good ones knew this, anticipated it, and therefore built it into their routine, while the bad ones, which outnumbered those with talent, made up for the lack of entertainment value when heckled, booed, or otherwise driven off the stage. By contrast, the crowd that I saw that evening was the most well-behaved I’d seen thus far, and would have put the regulars at the Royal Opera House in Canterlot to shame for the atmosphere of hushed and attentive reverence they created.
They hung on her every word, as the saying goes, as A. K. Yearling described Daring Do’s obligatory descent into whichever ancient dungeon filled with traps that were somehow still working after so many thousands of years. Despite her desire to be a known and recognised as a serious academic, she remained a natural storyteller, and the way that she held the rapt attention of ponies who, were it any other author, would usually providing their own live commentary to the story or throwing things onto the stage, was a testament to that fact. Her voice filled the ancient hall, which once would have held banquets and entertainment for petty lordlings, and I too found myself taken in by what seemed like a spell cast over us all.
The chapter ended on a cliffhanger, with a particularly lethal and overly-complicated trap triggered and some manner of bloodthirsty mythical beast on our gallant heroine’s tail. We would all have to buy her book to find out how Daring Do escaped this one when it was finally published, and as the audience stomped their hooves and roared their approval I had a grim and unpleasant thought about how many of them, including Yours Truly, would survive General Market Garden’s next push to read it and find out what happens next. Her subsequent mobbing by her adoring fans prevented me from congratulating her and from providing a helpful critique that, now that I think of it, probably would not have been received well by her.
There was only one further minor hiccup along the way -- it didn’t actually inhibit the progression of the excavation, but it did, as these things often did, settle into my mind and continue to nag at me. Earthshaker, Chieftain of the Jerboa tribe (it was apparently no longer considered appropriate to call them the Rat Pony tribe, but I continued to do so in private if only because of what he in particular had done to me) was present in the fortress to attend to some important inter-tribe affair to do with their continued support in our war, and to avoid any particular tribe being seen as favoured it was decided to hold this on ‘neutral’ ground. They were organising, you see, and I’d already expressed my private concerns to Princess Celestia that they might prove a threat to Equestria if they ceased squabbling amongst themselves and started working together. She reminded me that we were fighting for friendship for all ponies and to worry about one threat at a time, before ordering another round of cake and diverting the conversation to something banal.
[Though relations had been strained by the massacre at Virion Hive, Earthshaker’s distrust of Equestria remained an anomaly amongst the Badlands tribes, who, on the whole, supported our war against the Changelings. The potential threat of a united Badlands hostile to Equestria had also been raised by a number of officers in the military and some politicians, whose fears would later prove to be completely unfounded in the years of cooperation that followed. As for the cake and the conversation, my nephew had chosen to raise this at a party, and for one evening I would have liked to avoid talking shop.]
In the short term, I’d already had my worries about General Market Garden ruining our vital alliance with these tribes by opening her mouth and offending one of the natives, particularly the contentious Earthshaker who, though he saw the evident necessity of it all, remained decidedly unhappy on the necessity of cooperating with the ‘servants of the Tyrants of the Sun and Moon’ as he continued to call us, but our illustrious General was easily distracted with the job micromanaging the army’s supply lines and mercifully left dealing with the locals to more socially capable officers. If the delegates were offended by her infrequent appearances they did not care to voice it.
For reasons that ought to be obvious, I avoided Earthshaker as much as possible beyond the bare minimum required by basic courtesy. However, it was impossible to avoid him completely, and eventually we were forced into a mutually unpleasant situation where we had to make polite and civil small talk while we both waited for Major General Garnet to arrive so this meeting could start. I don’t exactly recall how the topic of the upcoming excavation had come up in the conversation, besides desperately trying to find something to chat aimlessly about once talk of the weather had finally run dry. Nevertheless, when the news was quite casually brought up, he frowned disapprovingly at me.
“The tombs below this fortress are cursed,” he said.
“How so?” I asked. “Is it anything I should be worried about?”
“That depends if you’re stupid enough to disturb the ancient dead,” he said solemnly. At first I thought that he was joking or trying to unnerve me, but either he was extremely dedicated or being honest, and it was the insult that nudged me into believing the latter.
“I’ll make sure the grave-robbing is kept to an appropriate minimum, then.”
His expression did not change, and I knew then that he was being deadly serious. “Our stories tell us of the king who once lived in this castle, knowing that ponies of an empire long fallen had delved deep beneath his throne and buried their dead and their treasure below, and despite the warnings from his priest, his curiosity overcame his good sense and ordered an expedition below. The dead there rose from their tombs and slaughtered the entire castle, and the kingdom fell.”
Major General Garnet had by then finally arrived (it turned out he was delayed because he was giving an impromptu lecture on postage stamps to a hapless clerk) and the meeting began at last, so I hadn’t the time to question the Chieftain further about this particular story. In what I could only assume was a measure calculated to spite me, he left before I could prod him for further details, and, well, given that my back would still ache from time to time with the flogging he’d personally given me even after those years had passed, I could be forgiven for not wanting to speak to him any more than I truly had to.
I did, however, ask Corded Ware and A. K. Yearling, our experts, about this particular story when I next met them in the officers mess for dinner.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” snapped Corded Ware, and he must have seen the arching of my eyebrow at that remark and thus added a quick ‘sir’ to the end of that. “It’s merely a legend, a myth, from a superstitious tribe of backwards savages.”
Ordinarily, I would have agreed with him, but the fact that this sort of thing might have happened again with the Diamond Dogs much more recently had led me to believe that there was a chance, however slim, that there really was something to these old ‘legends’. Nightmare Moon, after all, was merely an old ponies’ tale right up until the moment the sun failed to rise.
“Local stories can help us in uncovering what really happened,” said A. K. Yearling. “Tales become twisted, distorted, exaggerated, and so on with each telling, but there’s often some truth behind it. Perhaps the king opening the tomb happened to coincide with a disastrous event that ended his kingdom, like a war or a plague, and over the years the stories spread and ponies believed the two events were directly linked.”
I suppose I was in no real position to argue; decades of research and study versus my strange hunch that something was wrong was hardly a fair comparison, and so I quietly accepted A. K. Yearling’s sensible explanation for it all and simply carried on with things. Curses aren’t real, as Corded Ware had said, and the dead don’t rise from their graves until such a time Faust grows bored with her creation and decides to start it all again from scratch.
The engineers cleared the blockage by hoof on the following day, having been bribed with extra beer rations, extended leave, and tickets to an exclusive burlesque show to pull an all-nighter, and the archaeologists, each giddy with excitement, immediately descended into the dungeons to begin their excavation. This basement area was the only part of the entire fortress that had not been ‘renovated’ at all by the military, and remained more or less in the same state as it was after the engineers had collapsed a large section of it to keep the Changelings out. I felt a strange and foreboding sense of deja vu as I descended with the team down the spiral stairs to the dungeons, and the way that the spirals would reverse direction for no reason that seemed obviously logical took me by surprise once more. The stairs also went down considerably further from the ground floor than one would otherwise expect from what was effectively a basement, and I had the rather unpleasant feeling that the native ponies who had built this in the first place did so to make entrance and exit to what lay below as difficult as possible.
At the bottom of this winding, labyrinthine set of stairwells was a modern addition in the form of a large wooden door, which had been reinforced with sturdy metal bars and iron studs in case any Changelings somehow made it through the rubble. The light from my horn danced upon its surface, and standing before it I was stricken by an unexplained sense of foreboding. I knew exactly what was behind it, though I had not visited the dungeons since the night of the battle here, but the irrational fear that some manner of grotesque monster, dragged up from the darkest depths beneath the keep, lay in ambush behind it had wormed its way deep into my mind. The weight of my heavy sabre strapped to my back was a reassuring one, as I swallowed my trepidation, gently pushed the door open, and shone the light of my horn through the widening gap.
The broad, underground chamber with the low ceiling supported by squat pillars was much as I remembered it, aside from the fact that over half of it was buried in a large pile of rubble. There was a gap cleared, about the height of a large pony and just as wide, reinforced with sturdy wooden beams. Despite the bright light emanating from my horn, much of it was still shrouded in an opaque, murky darkness, resembling a black fog that had somehow coalesced from the depths below and seeped into this chamber. The rusted old chains and manacles were still attached to those pillars, as though the engineers who worked down here feared what ghosts they might anger if they removed them, and I shuddered to think what it must have been like to be chained up down here and forgotten. As before, the truly maddening array of pictograms carved into the walls made one dizzy just looking at them; I recognised some Haygyptian there, not that I could ever figure out hieroglyphics or have much cause to add that dead tongue to my repertoire, but much of the other peculiar chicken-scratch designs seemed impossible to be considered a true language. Whether or not they were truly conveying information, had mystical or arcane purposes, or were the product of a deranged mind remained to be answered, but, I thought to myself, perhaps with this little archaeological expedition I might finally receive some answers.
I ducked my head to enter a dungeon apparently built for ponies about a head shorter than me, though A. K. Yearling seemed to have no such trouble as she followed me inside. She gasped audibly in amazement, and when I looked over my shoulder at her I saw an expression of wonder on her face, in stark contrast to the sensation of dread that simmered within me. The evidence of the engineers’ work was plainly evident to see all around, ‘contaminating’ the site as the esteemed author put it; hoofmarks in the thick layer of stone dust were everywhere, as were great areas where whatever equipment they used had cleared much of it, but true to Southern Cross’ word, the rubble his sappers had cleared from the blockage there remained intact, piled up neatly in the corner for the archaeologists to tinker about with as they pleased. However, they appeared, at least to my untrained eyes, to have cleaned up after themselves, and nothing of the modern world that I could see had been left behind, leaving only those old things, predating Equestria, if in a slightly disassembled state.
The archaeologists followed, but this was rather old hat to them, I imagined, as their responses were a little more subdued. Besides, they were really after the ancient Crystal Empire stuff below, so for them I would assume this was merely window-dressing. A few of them carried bags of equipment, which they had insisted on carrying themselves despite spindly backs of some of these nerds, having rejected my offer of inflicting that onerous duty on whichever soldiers had misbehaved this week and required a boring punishment. Cannon Fodder was last, remaining a respectable distance to avoid snuffing out the light of my horn if he wandered too close. The team busied themselves at the gap cleared by the engineers, where Corded Ware had discovered that the unintended side effect of trying to make Southern Cross’ ponies rush their work meant that the gap was a little too tight to allow them to push their laden bags through. I left them to it, for I’d be damned if I was going to help him overcome the consequences of his own decisions, and instead accompanied A. K. Yearling as she examined the carvings on the walls.
She seemed to have a better idea of what they were about, and indeed this was the most animated that I’d ever seen her in these few short days. I could barely keep up as she went from wall to wall, pillar to pillar, pointing out some of the more interesting carvings. One depicted an ancient pegasus myth about how they received their wings from their old heathen gods so they can chase the sun and moon, and another simply read ‘Gertrude was here’ in Old High Griffonic. A particular carving caught my immediate attention: it depicted a large alicorn rearing on her hind legs, with a flowing mane and tail, wielding an enormous sword in her mouth earth-pony style, and the sun emblazoned on her cutie mark. Above, in Ancient Ponish, a language I could read, was the word ‘Cimmareian’.
“Hello, Auntie,” I said. I didn’t expect that an image of Princess Celestia would turn up here of all places. [I travelled a lot in my youth, before I was crowned princess.]
Miss Yearling, however, was fascinated by a rather more striking thing on the wall, one that I recognised from my previous visit here. It was not a carving like the others but a painted fresco, and depicted a stylised pony’s skull within a halo from which three lines emerged from below to give the impression of an ascending comet.
“The triumph over death,” she said breathlessly. “King Sombra was obsessed with alicorn immortality. His followers must have painted this on the wall.”
“I’ve seen it elsewhere,” I said. “In an old city, now inhabited by a tribe of Badlands natives. They weren’t terribly hospitable last time I visited there, so you’ll have to forgive me if I wouldn’t want to accompany you on a trip there.”
“The Crystal Empire must have spread its influence farther than we thought.” She tapped her chin, and peered at the curious symbol through her thick-rimmed glasses. “They were the dominant power in Northern Equestria, and we knew they established colonies far to the south, but all of this implies they had a much greater presence in the Badlands than historians first realised.”
“But why?” I asked, and A. K. Yearling turned and looked up at me with a peculiar smile on her lips. “I’m sure the ponies who live here won’t forgive me for saying this, but I’ve been in the Badlands for a few years now and there’s not a lot of anything interesting or valuable here.”
“Now you’re thinking like an archaeologist,” she said, her tone suddenly friendly and warm, which took me by surprise. “The evidence we find often reveals more questions than it answers. Just what were the Crystal Ponies doing down here?”
“I think we’re about to find out,” I said.
The Crystal Ponies had managed to squeeze through the gap with their equipment, and now it was our turn. The sappers had been very thorough in collapsing that portion of the chamber, for which I was immensely thankful for years ago when Changelings poured through this basement, and so the blockage itself was no mere wall of broken stone and paving, which had necessitated clearing a deep tunnel to allow us egress to the other side. I let A. K. Yearling through first and the slim pegasus slipped through the gap effortlessly, as though she had squeezed through such tight, partially collapsed structures before. However, when it came to my turn, I found that I had considerably greater difficulty, and the rough stone chafed painfully against my flanks until I wormed my way through to the other side, popping out like a champagne cork and falling in a heap on the ancient stone paving. I certainly would not have put it past the likes of Southern Cross to have instructed his sappers to clear a gap just small enough to inflict the maximum amount of indignity on me. Cannon Fodder fared little better than I, as he still wore his old suit of bulky Royal Guard armour to this little expedition and had gotten stuck. This necessitated a great deal of tugging on his forelegs, while the burlier members of the archaeological team tried to dislodge a few of the blocks of rubble around my aide’s armoured backside.
When my aide was finally freed and everypony on the other side of the blockage, we carried on. On the other side of the cleared tunnel the chamber itself looked much the same as it did before: the same pillars, the same rusted iron chains, and the same maddening scrawl carved onto the stone. However, at the far end, which I had not seen before in my brief time here years ago, as my attention was directed elsewhere, was a large wooden door set into a great and ornately carved stone frame. The heavy planks of aged wood were reinforced with metal bars, which seemed out of place here.
“It looks like a recent addition,” said A. K. Yearling. “The Badlands ponies?”
“Metal ore is a rarity here,” I said. “We use it to barter with the local tribes, and they tend to use it to make weapons and armour. I don’t know why they’d use it on a door here, unless they wanted to keep somepony out, or in.”
[My nephew can be forgiven for not mentioning so, but some Badlands tribes used the metal—particularly steel—to fashion farming tools. The rocky soil in the region was too rough and thick to be easily worked by bronze or stone, but high-quality steel allowed reclamation of land once thought impossible, improving the tribes' ability to conserve precious water.]
“Likely just another local superstition,” said Corded Ware dismissively, as he brushed past us and casually pulled the door open. The ancient hinges squealed in protest at being disturbed from their thousand year-long rest, and rust flaked off to collect in a small pile on the floor. Beyond that, a set of yet more stairs in a tight corridor receded into a pitch black darkness below. “Come along, we’re here for our legacy, not theirs.”
I exchanged glances with A. K. Yearling, who, apparently acknowledging and sharing my assessment that Corded Ware was acting strangely even by his usual standards, shrugged in response and followed the lead archaeologist into the dark depths. Well, I thought, I could have turned back, made an excuse about some important work to do with the ongoing war effort, and left them to it, but a certain unpleasant adage about the death of cats applied here. My hooves might have been itching, but I ignored the usual warning sign from my subconscious that something was wrong and followed along anyway; I had to know what happened, and that desire for answers had overridden my paranoia, and besides, there was nothing immediately threatening to life, limb, and sanity yet.
As we descended down those steps, the light from our horns forming a bubble of illumination around our small group, it occurred to me that once we’d finished for the day I’d have to climb all of them back up again. I made a mental note to ask Twilight Sparkle to teach me how to teleport, as not only would it be simply more convenient to teleport straight to my favourite seat at the bar in the Imperial Club, it would also help get me out of further messes. At any rate, the descent dragged on interminably, but when we finally reached the bottom and spread out into another underground chamber, I checked my watch and saw that only a few minutes had passed.
Mercifully, the ceiling was much higher in this room, so I could finally stand straight without having to tilt my head down. The light from our horns could only banish a small portion of the gloom, but within our island of light I could see that it was in much the same style as the previous room: tall pillars, covered in those same maddening carvings, supported the tall ceiling, and all around on the ground we saw that the ancient layer of dust had been disturbed, but not recently. Hoofprints, heavy boots by the looks of them, had scuffed the stone, and I could make out claw marks too. Here the air was stuffy and warm, and presumably ancient. I noticed that there were no chains attached to the pillars, as in the room before, which implied to me that the Badlands ponies hadn’t appropriated this room for the use of imprisonment and torture.
We spread out somewhat, and thus the unicorns were better able to illuminate more of this chamber. This revealed a row of sarcophagi along the length of both of the side walls, each arranged to stick out towards the middle of the room. Each sarcophagus had an ornately-carved lid, depicting a pony, presumably the one whose mortal remains lay within the stone box, in solemn repose. Though these representations were unique, they were all carved in exactly the same pose: resting on their backs, with their forelegs folded over their chests, and their blank faces staring up at the ceiling.
Ms Yearling didn’t exactly make a ‘squee’ noise when she saw them, but it was a close enough approximation. She darted over with a speed that seemed at odds with her age, crouched down, and peered closely at the array of Ancient Haygyptian hieroglyphs carved into the side of the sarcophagus.
While she did that, however, Corded Ware ignored the no-doubt fascinating artefacts and strode confidently to the door on the far end. I turned to Cannon Fodder, who, as ever, remained unfazed by the very old things dating back to the days when the word ‘Equestria’ was merely a geographical expression, and nodded in the head archaeologist’s direction. “Keep an eye on our friend over there,” I said. “Make sure he doesn’t get himself in trouble.”
“Yes, sir.” With that, my aide trotted on over to where Corded Ware and his team crowded around the door.
I approached A. K. Yearling at the sarcophagus, and peered over at the blank expression on the effigy on the top. It was painted, though the paint itself had faded over the course of the many thousands of years, and depicted pale grey pony clad in what might have once been vibrant robes. She wore a headband of some description, painted yellow presumably to approximate gold.
“It’s very rare to find Haygyptian tombs this intact,” she said, not looking up from the hieroglyphs. “Most tombs we find have already been looted by grave-robbers long ago. This one holds the mummy of a priestess. Judging by the style of the engraving, this was from the early kingdom, centuries before Princess Celestia was even born and when the unicorns moved the sun and moon with magic. It says she burned out her magic doing this, and spent the rest of her life serving as a priestess.”
To my surprise I found myself rather interested in all of this; all the talk about the technical aspects of archaeology had thoroughly bored me, of course, but to find the summation of an entire pony’s life contained within a carved stone box and preserved through the endless aeons was strangely fascinating. It made me wonder what sort of legacy I would leave, interred within a similar stone box in the family mausoleum, assuming that there was enough of me left to bury after the Changelings had finished with me. This, perhaps, is what archaeology was really about; not just the made-up adventures or the faffing about with digging and dating old things, but the lives and stories of the ponies long dead who came before us.
“So why wasn’t it?” I asked. A. K. Yearling shot me a blank look. “Looted, I mean. It’s seen Crystal Ponies, Badlands tribes, and even Diamond Dogs living in the fort above us. If your friend over there at the door is correct, the Crystal Ponies even went poking around inside this crypt for Discord knows what reasons. And that story about the king who lost his kingdom after looking around down here, would he also not have ransacked the place too, or is the alleged curse that quick? Either nopony’s made it this far, or everypony who descended down here was unusually conscientious about maintaining the sanctity of this tomb, or somepony’s been tidying up after them.”
“You know,” she said, smiling, “you might have made a decent archaeologist.”
“I suppose I would have to find something to do after this war is over,” I said, sotto voce. “But doesn’t this all seem a little odd to you?”
“Yes. Exciting, isn’t it? Come along, sir, we won’t find those answers just standing here.”
With that, she trotted off to join Corded Ware and his team, who appeared to be having a little bit of trouble with the door. I wandered closer, taking my time and affecting to show that I wasn’t really all that impressed by the very old and rather pretty things all around me. There, the door was of a Crystal Empire design, and thus crafted from the very material that they revered so much, and set into a frame likewise made out of that same crystal. In the stark light of my horn it shimmered brightly, and inside its semi-transparent structure I could see shifting shapes of greens and purples gently swirl like smoke from a freshly-extinguished candle. I could feel the magic radiating from it, much like those peculiar spheres that they had tried to smuggle in earlier, but muted somewhat.
Corded Ware himself stood before the door, his horn glowing with a deep green aura and his eyes were screwed up in concentration. His fellows had gathered in a semi-circle around it, and as I joined them with A. K. Yearling I saw Cannon Fodder leaning casually against the wall, staring boredly at the proceedings.
“I don’t understand it. It should just open,” muttered Corded Ware under his breath.
“Having trouble there?” I asked, doing my best not to sound amused at his evident struggling. “Can’t we just knock it down?”
“It’s sealed with magic,” he explained, the aura from his horn dimming into nothing. “I know the spell, it’s the same as the ones we used in the Crystal Empire, but it just doesn’t seem to work.”
“Perhaps it’s a different spell?” I posited; I knew precisely why his magic just wasn’t working, and the reason was standing there next to the door happily and very messily munching on a chocolate ration bar, but, well, given that he’d made me feel rather stupid on several occasions, I didn’t feel particularly inclined to be helpful to him that day.
“I know the spell, sir,” he snapped, clearly growing more irritated.
“I thought you said you weren’t here,” I said, remembering that conversation we’d had in the mess earlier. “How would you know the spell, then, if you were just another one of Sombra’s slaves?”
Corded Ware rounded on me abruptly, eyes narrowed in disgust, and I’d wondered if I stepped a bit too far over the line. “I read books, sir,” he hissed, with the unsaid implication that I don’t. “And I’d thank you not to bring up that tyrant’s name so casually again.”
I mumbled a half-hearted apology and instructed Cannon Fodder to go and help the other archaeologists with their luggage. With my aide out of the way again, Corded Ware attempted the spell once more. His horn lit once more, radiating a sickly green light that flowed forth into the crystal door before him. This light sank into the shimmering surface, melded with the strange luminescence within, and with an ominous rumble of crystal grinding on crystal the door opened before us. A sharp but brief blast of cold, copper-tasting air struck us, picking at the folds of my sweat-soaked and dusty uniform, and swiftly faded. Beyond, through this yawning portal, amidst the ancient gloom that the light of my horn seemed too feeble to banish, I could see things glowing in the distance with peculiar green and purple tones that put me in mind of an infected wound. My horn tingled in response to the old and malignant magic radiating from whatever those glowing things were, and I felt the desire to turn and run seize me by the throat.
Corded Ware, however, breathed an enormous sigh of relief, and he smiled broadly at the sight beyond the crystal door. “Well, then,” he said, “destiny awaits.”
“Well, this is all very ominous,” I said to A. K. Yearling, as we marched into the ancient chamber. “Do long-abandoned tombs often glow like that?”
“Only the haunted ones,” she said, grinning to show that she was joking. I, however, didn’t find that particularly funny, and you, dear reader, might begin to understand why when I describe this hall in greater detail.
The space was about the size of the interior of Canterlot Cathedral, but with none of the light and airiness about it. Where the spiritual centre of Equestria was designed and built in a way calculated to demonstrate the true majesty of Faust’s creation and our glorious part in the story she has crafted for this world, this entire space seemed to be entirely constructed in such a way as to evoke the very opposite feeling. Granted, that might have been due to my own expectations colouring my own perspective of things, but it is difficult to describe the interior of this vast hall in anything approaching appealing terms. The darkness that surrounded us was suffocating, more so than in the rooms leading here, and seemed more than merely the absence of light that is Princess Luna’s night sky, which makes what little light remains in the stars and the moon seem all the more glorious for it, but an unnatural thing that absorbed and quelled whatever illumination dared to try and banish it. It gnawed at the very edges of the glow of my horn like a rabid beast upon wounded prey, until I feared that I too would be consumed by the gloom and lost forever.
Yet as more unicorns followed me inside and added their own illumination to my feeble light, and my eyes adjusted with irritating lack of urgency to the darkness, I could make out more clearly the features of this thoroughly unpleasant place. Vast pillars held up a tall, vaulted ceiling that to me seemed to reach much further than the depth of our descent would otherwise allow. There seemed to be little to no ornamentation to the entire vista, merely clean, straight lines that appeared to my untrained eyes to be just too perfect to be made by mortal hooves. Much of this furnishing was crafted, or perhaps grown, from sleek crystal that shimmered with the feeble light of our horns, and as we walked our metal horseshoes ran out like the tolling of bells on the crystalline surface. Those lights in the distance, towards which Corded Ware was leading us towards, were the only other sources of illumination here, and even they, glowing unnaturally, could only pierce the oppressive darkness as though they were lamps seen through dense fog.
Speaking of the apparent leader of this expedition, he strode confidently towards those lights and his entourage followed. In fact, only A. K. Yearling and I were at all perturbed by our surroundings, though she took this all in with a sense of quiet awe as opposed to the abject terror that I felt. Cannon Fodder remained thoroughly unbothered by all of this, for which I was thankful; the sound of him chewing on his chocolate bar, usually exceptionally off-putting as he tended to do so with all of the grace of a griffon helping himself to a nice, tasty rat, actually helped to dispel some of the bleak atmosphere of this place. His habitual lack of tact exemplified that when he ruined the reverential tone that Corded Ware and the Crystal Ponies were trying to maintain when he blurted out:
“How did the Changelings get through the door?”
Corded Ware stopped and turned to face me, and not, curiously enough, my aide, as though I was somehow responsible for everything he said and did. “What?” he asked.
“It’s a perfectly valid question,” I said, feeling strangely reluctant to be speaking for Cannon Fodder, but I wanted to know the answer, too. Every little discrepancy was adding up, each a small piece to the mental puzzle that was becoming very readily a giant exclamation mark in my head. In fact, I felt a little embarrassed that I didn’t think of that particular problem myself; I had been there, after all, and sent engineers and soldiers to desperately plug the entrance from which the enemy were spilling out into the keep, and I hadn’t thought to consider that I should be seeing where they had all come from. “How did the Changelings get through the magically-sealed door? Did they also read books?”
He held that stare, and I could see the impatience in his eyes at having his ‘destiny’ delayed by my needling of this rapidly-unravelling cover story he’d raised around his true intentions. “Maybe,” he said, presumably having failed to come up with a more convincing lie. “How should I know? I’m an expert in the Crystal Empire, not the Changelings. Perhaps they came up through an alternative entrance.”
“I didn’t see one in there.”
“Perhaps it was a hidden alternative entrance.” He snarled at me, and I felt the patrician urge to slap it out of his stupid face. “I am on the cusp of rediscovering our ancient history, and you keep on interfering with these pointless questions. If you don’t want to take part in this venture, then go back upstairs and let the professionals manage this. Until then, be quiet, and you might learn something for once.”
Well, that was that. I tend not to lose my temper very often, but right there I was very tired of being pushed around like that, of being just on the verge of finding out the truth of what this fellow was really about but always having it yanked away from me like a dog being tormented with a treat just out of reach. Now I was about to bite him, metaphorically. I raised my hoof to strike his cheek. “How dare you presume to speak-”
It was A. K. Yearling who stopped me from doing something that, perhaps in hindsight, I ought to have done earlier. She darted in with surprising speed and alacrity for her age, intercepted my hoof before I swung it, and quite firmly guided it back down to the ground. As the clarity of good sense finally cleared the haze of aristocratic indignation and I realised what I was doing, I saw that his fellow archaeologists had quickly swarmed to his side, ready to pounce before I could complete the swing of my hoof before Ms Yearling stopped me. Something seemed different about them, no longer timid and easily cowed, but ready to defend their boss should the need arise, as it very nearly just did.
“If you two could stop behaving like foals for a moment and focus,” she snarled. “Professor Corded Ware, Prince Blueblood is allowed to be curious about the circumstances of a battle he took part in years ago. And Prince Blueblood, archaeology is a slow, careful process, and you aren’t going to get those answers immediately. Now, we have work to do.”
The silence that descended wasn’t just awkward, it was downright hostile, as we held one another’s gaze in the cold, oppressive gloom of this ancient place. That stallion was up to something, I was now sure of it, but that little quantum of doubt, that I was an uneducated imbecile with irrational fears up against frightfully clever and rational ponies, remained. If A. K. Yearling was satisfied with Corded Ware’s integrity, then who was I to contradict her? And if it turned out that I was right all along, I could at least indulge in a moment of insufferable smugness as a result.
Corded Ware was the first to blink. “Fine, so long as there are no more interruptions,” he said.
“I’m quite eager to see where this all leads,” I said, by which, of course, I meant that I would be keeping my eye on him. It was at this point that I belatedly realised that I ought to have brought a team of soldiers with me as insurance, but, perhaps, considering what happened next it was better that I hadn’t -- fewer lives to weigh on my conscience now.
“Good,” said A. K. Yearling, with the air of a teacher who had just convinced two foals to stop fighting and make up. “Now let’s get on with it.”
We did indeed ‘get on with it’ in that same hostile silence as before, which allowed my overactive imagination to make all sorts of monsters out of the half-glimpsed shadows in the darkness all around me. My nerves remained twitchy, and I found myself almost jumping out of my hide at every unusual noise emanating from the stillness all around. The air, I noticed, was cold, and much more so than one would expect for this part of the world even underground; it felt more like the climate of the frigid north, where these Crystal Ponies came from, and I silently wondered to myself if the original inhabitants had magically enchanted this place to evoke the feeling of home. This place still radiated that ancient magic, and though I could sense that most of it came from those peculiar lights that Corded Ware was leading us towards, I detected that it was more faintly coming from all around too, as if the walls themselves were magic. I, of course, claim to be no expert on such things, but from what little that I could remember from magic school I knew that there had to be some sort of mechanism maintaining all of this magical equipment, and that it was unlikely to still be working after these untold millennia, or however long it’s really been, without somepony or something keeping it all in working order.
“I say,” I said, more to fill the absence of any noise besides our hoofsteps and my aide still feeding, “Prof, is this what you expected to find down here?”
“Hm?” He glanced over his shoulder at me, irritation in his eyes at having this moment marred yet again by Yours Truly being annoying. “Yes, of course.”
“And what, pray tell, is it?” I made a show of looking around at the high-vaulted ceiling and the tall pillars that supported it. “This is an odd-looking trading post.”
Corded Ware sighed in frustration. “That’s because it isn’t.”
As we neared those glowing lights, I quickened the pace to catch up with him, only for his associates, no longer appearing as the weak nerds that my foalish instincts had yearned to bully, to close in on me. It is remarkable how much a mere change of posture and attitude can do to hide one’s true nature, but in my defence and, well, everypony else’s, we had little reason to think otherwise of these ponies beyond my now-vindicated paranoid conjecture. They stood taller, no longer hunched as though they’d spent a lifetime pouring over books, and their stride so much more confident; had Corded Ware here given the word they might have pulled me limb from limb.
“Then what is it?” asked A. K. Yearling, her suspicions finally catching up to where mine had already crossed the metaphorical finish line and had wasted perfectly good champagne by spraying it all over a pretty mare in a sash. “You said you didn’t know. That was the whole point of this expedition.”
“Fine,” snapped Corded Ware. “Allow me to illuminate you.”
We’d reached the lights by now, which, as we drew closer, were revealed to be from some sort of crystalline panel that looked as though it had been grown from the floor itself than constructed and placed there. It was about the size of a ping-pong table, circular, with a thin pillar in the direct centre that reached up and disappeared into the darkness, presumably reaching the shadowed ceiling. The lights emanated from a series of crystal nodules protruding from it, arranged in a manner that seemed haphazard to my ignorant eyes but probably had some sort of real reasoning behind it.
Corded Ware’s horn flashed with a particularly pustulent shade of green magic, and he directed this at the panel before him. Light then filled the entire hall. I blinked away the stars that danced before my eyes, and the glare died down gradually until I could finally take in the entire vista that had finally been revealed to me.
The hall was long and narrow, relatively speaking, and along its sides were arrayed a great number of perfectly uniform and identical crystal cylinders. They were somewhat opaque, but were just translucent enough for me to make out something vaguely pony-shaped within each. I was put in mind of those pods the Changelings used to store and transport prisoners, but without their distinctly and disgustingly organic construction. There must have been hundreds of them, not that I was in the right frame of mind to start fastidiously counting them. The entire chamber itself looked thoroughly sterile, crafted out of clean, sleek crystal and glittered in the bright light shining from the lamps in the high ceiling, and despite its apparent age, not a speck of dust remained on the floor, nor on the panel or those strange cylinders.
“Impressive,” I said, trying to sound anything but impressed and likely failing miserably in the process. It truly was stunning, and far from the dusty old ruin that I had expected. “But I’m no less ‘illuminated’ than I was before.”
Corded Ware smiled, and it was a smug, self-satisfied sort that I yearned to wipe off his face with a chainsaw. “You, Prince Blueblood, were so very close to figuring it out,” he said. “But your lack of commitment is your undoing. If only you had pushed just a little bit harder, then you could have stopped what is to come.”
I stepped forward, and his cronies moved to bar my way. Cannon Fodder, having finished his chocolate bar, moved to my side, his hoof reaching for the spear strapped to his back.
“Corded Ware, what’s going on?” demanded A. K. Yearling. She too, marched to my side without fear, all but attempting to force her way past the bodyguards. It was then, rather belatedly, that it all fell into place for me, and the feeling of vindication over my suspicions was quickly overridden by both the embarrassment that it had taken me so long to see what had been staring me in the face and fear over what it truly meant.
“You were there, weren’t you?” I said. “Here, I mean. More than a thousand years ago. You’re no mere archaeologist.”
“Finally, the stupid Prince gets it,” said Corded Ware, his smile growing ever more smug. He untied his bow tie and wrenched it from his neck, letting it fall to the ground, likewise tossed his glasses away, and he allowed himself to stand straighter, radiating the sort of authority that I normally only saw with supercilious commissars who exercise their authority in petty and meaningless ways. The group of ‘archaeologists’, now revealed to be his henchponies, parted to let him approach and stand face-to-face with me. “Yes, Prince Blueblood, I was there. We were all there, one thousand years ago, when the Crystal Empire brought King Sombra’s perfect order to Equestria.”
“You mean slavery, I suppose,” I said. Then, to A. K. Yearling, I remarked, “just like Chrysalis, really. I suppose she’s not all that original.”
Now, I expected that this quiet, introverted author approaching the wrong end of middle age to be as absolutely terrified of this turn of events, utterly predictable in hindsight, as I was pretending not to be, but if anything she seemed rather more put together than I. In fact, I’d have said that she had somehow lost about three decades of age, and stood tall, alert, and ready to fight or flee at a moment’s notice. It was the same reaction that I had seen in trained soldiers, of course, and perhaps to a lesser extent in the likes of Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash when they were exposed to mortal peril in my presence. She said nothing, apparently content to let me take the lead for once, but I assumed that now that it had become abundantly clear that my paranoia was right all along, she felt it best to keep quiet and let the alleged war hero take charge.
“Everypony knows their place in the King’s order,” sneered Corded Ware, though I began to doubt that was truly his name. “Not like now, where you raise commoners to become princesses.”
“And what would your place be? I can’t imagine there was that much need for archaeologists in Sombra’s time; there was barely any history to uncover.”
Corded Ware chuckled and shook his head. “Ignorance is alive and well in this time, I see,” he said. “Has so little of our glorious history survived to this day?”
I could keep him believing that I was little more than an imbecile, which I found never required too much effort on my part as ponies seemed to just assume, with some justification, that I’m not terribly clever, and let him waste time indulging in puffing himself up by validating the suspicions I’d had about him since about the time I’d met him. The panel seemed important, as it continued to glow ominously and the magic radiating off it was like the glare of a lighthouse piercing through the dense fog. If I shot it with my magic then it might do something to scupper whatever plan this ancient maniac standing before me had concocted, but one of his guards stood in the way. Not that I was particularly concerned at all with hitting one of them, as distasteful as I found the thought of killing, but I had but one shot at this and there were enough of them to strike me down before I could get a second shot. Yet, if I could nudge Cannon Fodder close enough to the panel to shut it off before it could do whatever it was supposed to do…
“I see what you’re doing,” said Corded Ware, the grin on his face was gone, and the blank expression that replaced it was all the more jarring and horrifying for its absence of emotion. “There’ll be no villain’s exposition from me for you to exploit. Seize them, and hold the Prince down while I fetch his mask and awaken the shards.”
The two closest stallions did just that, grabbing me by my upper forelegs and then forcing me to the ground with a strong application of force to my scarred back. I fell upon the floor, bashing my chin against the cold, crystalline surface in the process. Cannon Fodder shouted something, but I was unable to turn my head to see what they were doing to him and A. K. Yearling, yet some sort of struggle persisted judging by the sounds of shouting going on. I tried to push up against the two pinning me down, each with a forehoof placed upon my back and pushing me against the ground with sufficient force that breathing became a chore. They were far stronger than their all-too-convincing disguises had otherwise led me to believe, but that didn’t stop me from trying.
With my head on the floor and my lower jaw aching and ringing with the impact, I could just about see Corded Ware’s four legs step towards the panel. He bent over, fiddled with one of the glowing things, and I heard the clanking of some ancient machinery followed by a deep hiss of escaping air from seemingly all around, yet from my position on the floor I could scarcely see anything else of what was going on. However, I still had the use of my horn, and his shiny crystal flanks presented an absolutely perfect target I could hardly miss. Unfortunately, this thought also occurred to his henchponies, and the one on my right raised his free hoof directly in front of my horn.
“The moment your horn starts glowing,” said Corded Ware, not bothering to turn his head to look at me as he spoke, “he will snap it off before you can fire a single shot. You will be a much more useful servant to me with your horn intact.”
Judging by the ease at which they pulled me down, and I was still not exactly on the light and delicate side back then, I was assured that his confidence was not misplaced. Still, it meant that he did not plan on killing me, at least not yet, which gave me time to figure out how to get out of this, though I admit that it looked pretty damned bleak from where I was.
Corded Ware then turned from the panel, and held in his magic a mask made from a dark metal, with narrow slits for eyes and two red spikes protruding from the top and centre that put me in mind of the peculiar diadem that his fallen King was often depicted wearing. I had no idea what it did, but something told me that it was decidedly not merely for ceremonial purposes and that it should go nowhere near my face. I thrashed my neck from side to side, but the second of those strong stallions placed his hoof on the top of my head, knocking off my cap in the process, and pinned it down.
“That’s better,” said Corded Ware, as he crouched down next to me with the mask hovering in his magic close by. “Do you have any idea how frustrating it was to pretend to be this weak and feeble academic for so long, how insulting it was for a stallion of my station to have to ingratiate myself with the likes of the two of you? To awaken in a world that knew nothing of my King’s perfect order except Equestrian lies, and to have to tolerate that false Princess sitting on his throne, and to hide myself amongst those I once commanded in his name until I can finally enact his Contingency?”
The mask moved closer, and I saw Corded Ware grinning at me through its slitted eye holes. Despite what he said earlier, he could not help but indulge in gloating over a beaten adversary. “Do you know what this is?” he asked.
“A Nightmare Night costume mask,” I spat. “Did you get it from Barnyard Bargains?”
He laughed mockingly. “Get one last quip in while you can, dear Prince. When I put this mask on you, you as you know yourself will cease to be. A mindless, obedient servant, incapable of even completing bodily functions without my permission. There won’t be enough of you left inside to even pray for the release of death. But before that happens, I want you to see this, and you can receive those answers you desire.”
I still couldn’t see what was happening to A. K. Yearling and Cannon Fodder, but the cessation of sounds of struggle from over there did not fill me with much hope. This felt like the end, and not at the hooves of Changelings either, but by this petty, power-hungry lunatic indulging in a fantasy of an empire long-destroyed. He turned, mercifully taking the mask with him for now and with a barked direction, the strong pony pinning my head down grabbed it by my chin and forced it to the right to see somepony emerge from the closest of those crystal tubes.
The entire front swung open on a hinge on the top, and a peculiar, shimmering, silvery liquid discharged onto the floor and spread like mercury. The pony inside, if it could even be called such, fell from its upright position on hindlegs onto all fours, where it shivered and wobbled precariously like a newborn foal. There seemed to be something very wrong with it; it was a Crystal Pony, certainly, but where a normal Crystal Pony, if one could ever be called ‘normal’, was a pony that happened to look as though they were made of a sort of organic crystal, this one looked like a lump of inorganic crystal hewn by a clumsy artisan in a rush to resemble an alicorn, with a long, spiralled horn and a pair of wings made from interlocking slabs of thin crystal. Within its chest something glowed, and I realised that it was the same light as those mysterious orbs that Pencil Pusher had found earlier. Its four legs were sturdy, though they shook with what I took to be years of underuse, and its joints clearly hinged in some way to allow movement. Its sharply angular head bent down to the ground in a jerky, mechanical motion, and its jaw opened to discharge more of that mercury-like ichor onto the ground. Whatever it was, it did not look well.
“What in Tartarus is that thing?” I blurted out.
“That ‘thing’ is the future, Prince Blueblood,” said Corded Ware, beaming with pride as though he was a father presenting a son who had just earned his cutie mark. “The shards were our failures in our quest to conquer death itself. We extracted a soul from its body, and placed it within a vessel of undying crystal. Only, the soul didn’t take well to being removed from its body. They began to lose themselves. Still, they make excellent soldiers: obedient, loyal, they require neither food nor water, and they have no will of their own. A convenient accident made useful by the unparalleled genius of the King’s archmages, of which I was- ah, still am a member.”
This thing, the ‘shard’ as he had named it, lifted its head up and stared at Corded Ware. Its face was blank, not in terms of expression, but in terms of features. There was nothing there, no eyes, no mouth, and no nose; merely an empty, blocky slab of crystal carved or grown into the approximate shape of a skull and a muzzle. Yet even lacking eyes as it did, I could sense the tortured presence within, staring at me, and hating me with a fury that it was incapable of articulating.
[The knowledge required to extract a soul from a living being and place it within an object has been suppressed over the years with good reason. Corded Ware is correct in that a soul cannot survive intact without its physical form and vice versa, and all attempts to prevent the gradual decay of the ego, the sense of ‘self’, once removed and captured ended in costly failure. No good can come from this line of research beyond the purely theoretical and it will remain suppressed, as its practical implementation is nothing less than a form of spiritual torture. Just in case any of the few ponies cleared to read this gets any ideas about picking up where Corded Ware left off, pursuing this will be punished by petrification.]
“They killed the Diamond Dogs,” I said, as the whole horrible picture formed before my eyes. “And destroyed the Badlands pony kingdom here, just as in that story. At least they were good enough to tidy up after themselves.”
“The shards, ever loyal, are carrying out the last set of commands they received,” explained Corded Ware. “Keep this place safe and secure for our King to return, destroy all interlopers, and clear up any evidence of their actions. The Changelings must have dug a tunnel into the previous chamber, but the shards still filled up the hole. That is how they bypassed the magic door.”
“And those orbs you tried to smuggle in,” I said, “they contained souls?” An instant sense of revulsion struck me as I pictured in my mind that box of crystal spheres, and how my aide’s presence had caused them all, each apparently having held the living essence of what had been a pony, to go irrevocably dark. Perhaps, I thought, that Cannon Fodder’s abilities had merely broken the spell that kept the souls trapped within and finally released them into eternal rest. A better fate for them than to remain trapped within those crystal prisons.
“Yes, from a secret cache in the Crystal Empire.” He sighed. “Part of the Contingency. No matter, there are others, and there are enough already here to make short work of your army above, and once we activate the other tombs out there, we will retake what was ours. Our King may be banished again, but through me his legacy will live on.”
I felt my stomach give way; there were more of these hideous places out there? How many, filled with those murderous, soul-damaged husks, those ever-so-loyal killing machines that were the remnants of a long-dead and scarcely-missed empire, were dotted all across our fair realm, each awaiting the order to rise up? It didn’t bear thinking about, not until I could free myself and warn everypony else, assuming that they didn’t think I was mad for it.
“There is an entire crack division of Royal Guards above,” I said, trying and likely failing to inject some confidence in my words. “Battle-hardened veterans who have won battles that make the ancient wars you’ve seen look like schoolyard scraps, each armed with weapons your backwards mind couldn’t possibly comprehend. They’re no band of Diamond Dogs or Badlands savages, they are disciplined and efficient soldiers, and once they find out I’ve gone they’ll come down here and put an end to your silly little rebellion before it even starts. Let me go now, and I can arrange some form of clemency for you and your ponies.”
It was all futile, of course, to try to negotiate with the pony who believes he has all of the cards when I have none, but it was worth a shot. He stood there, smiling the insufferably smug smile of a pony who knows that he has won and has all the time in the world to indulge in that feeling of triumph, and waited for me to finish voicing my empty threat. At the end he shook his head, and said, “I think a demonstration is in order. Bring his friend, the stallion.”
My head was still held firm, so I could not turn it to see what was going on behind me, but I heard some sounds of struggle. Cannon Fodder was dragged forward, still clad in his heavy armour, and tugging in vain against the two burly stallions who held him.
“Over here.” Corded Ware pointed to a spot, just before where I was still pinned to the ground and next to him. Then, addressing the crystal monster still vomiting quicksilver like Yours Truly after a late evening, “Kill him.”
With jerky, unnatural movements, the shard lifted its head up straight and looked straight at Corded Ware, its face blank and its body rigid and still as though it was a statue. A moment passed, as my aide continued to pull at the strong hooves holding him in place, and Corded Ware observed with visibly mounting frustration.
“Didn’t you hear me?” demanded Corded Ware.
“It appears that a thousand years have left it a trifle deaf,” I said.
Corded Ware ignored me, and stepped closer to the shard, who continued to observe him without the slightest hint of anything resembling emotion or recognition. “I am His Majesty’s Thaumaturgist, and you will obey me. Kill this pony!”
I felt a sudden blast of intense heat. The shard’s horn flashed with a malignant green light, the air split with a metallic shriek, and Corded Ware was gone. In the split second between the last moments of his existence and the cessation therefore, I saw a glimpse of his body, bathed in that horrible glow, disintegrate, as if peeled layer by horrible layer to the bone in a less than a fraction of a second, and all that was left of him was a small pile of ashes, scorched bone, and the mask he was holding. The air tasted foul, as smoke rose from the smouldering crater where the would-be tyrant stood. The shard turned its attention to the two ponies holding Cannon Fodder. One turned to flee, but was likewise caught in the light and reduced to grey powder. The second was frozen in terror, and stood perfectly still as the warped creation killed him.
[Performing such a potent disintegration spell several times in succession without burnout should be impossible for most ponies. Where the requisite energy stems from confounds us to this day, but it is suspected that souls themselves were consumed to fuel their spells.]
Thinking Cannon Fodder had been slain, I let out a wordless, anguished cry, and pulled myself free of my captors. Whether I was filled with an insensate rage-fuelled strength or two burly stallions were stricken with such justifiable fear that they loosened their grip on me I do not know for certain, but I threw them off me with ease. I staggered to my hooves only to see my aide standing there perfectly unharmed, and only a little bit alarmed at what he had just witnessed.
The others ran. Before me, the shard stood there, regarding me with an inscrutable coldness. There seemed to be nothing behind where its eyes should be save for malice and madness. The thing hesitated, as though it tried to ascertain what exactly I was, but I was not about to stand around and hope for it to come to a favourable conclusion. Fear, colder and sharper than that I had ever felt before or since embraced me. There was no time to feel relief at Cannon Fodder’s inexplicable survival, and I resorted to the usual response to such mortal terror by turning on my hooves and running away, diving behind the panel for cover, and straight into the very last pony I’d ever expected to see.
Daring Do, as I’d always imagined her from the stories: a slim, lithe pegasus with a build that put one in mind of a coiled spring ready to burst into action, wearing a crumpled linen safari jacket that seemed to contain multiple shades of tan and a battered pith helmet that looked as though it had been fished out of the Amarezon many times.
“What?” was all that my fevered, fraught nerves could muster to say at the sight of a beloved fictional character come to life before me.
“I’ll explain if we survive, Blueblood!” she yelled, her voice not all that different from A. K. Yearling’s. “Now, run!”
The order was completely unnecessary, as I was already sprinting past her. The other pods in the hall were opening, too, and from each, another shard stumbled out into the hall on quivering legs. Given the vastness of the hall, I could assume that there were hundreds of the wretched, soulless things. I was not about to stop and count them, being much too busy running for my life. Fleeing the way we came from would mean running through a gauntlet of them, and I’d be dead before I could even make it past the first pod, which only left fleeing deeper into the underground complex. We galloped into the darkness, while those things massacred the remaining Crystal Pony researchers. I would have liked to have rescued one to interrogate them, but given their subterfuge, my near-death experience, and the fact that this was all their own fault I couldn’t feel particularly sorry for them.
The sharp, metallic sound of their lethal rays accompanied that of our horseshoes pounding on the crystal floor. My heart pounded frantically in my chest, gripped tightly in the icy hold of mortal terror; Changelings were a threat I knew, even if they were inherently sneaky and liable to attack without warning, but these things were something else entirely. There was no love lost between Corded Ware and me, but I hardly wanted to suffer the same fate as he. Besides, I told myself in an inane attempt to stay calm, it would be terrible form for a Prince to deny his people a funeral without even ashes left.
The hall stretched on before us, seemingly into infinity, until through the darkness and the feeble light of my horn I saw the far wall. Here the hall shrank somewhat, to the point that I could see the ceiling and the walls either side. There were no metal tubes occupied by slumbering husks here, but instead giant statues, each depicting an austere and stern-visaged Crystal Pony standing upright on its hindlegs, holding an ornate staff.
“The door!” shouted ‘Daring Do’. It was another one made of shimmering crystal, and my suspicions that it was sealed with magic were confirmed when I barged into it, shoulder-first, and painfully bounced off it.
I didn’t know the spell to unlock it, but panic can do one of two things to a pony: reduce them to a useless, gibbering wreck, or purge the mind of the distraction of conscious thought and allow one to act purely on impulse. Reaching out with my magic, my heart hammering in my chest, I could sense the network of energy maintaining the lock. Had I the time I could find the weak point and dispel it, but time was not a luxury we possessed. I would have to brute force my way through. The spell was powerful but ancient, its cohesion peeling away at the edges. All I had to do was apply enough strength and the arcane lock would be undone.
[Prince Blueblood had the potential to be a powerful unicorn, but has admitted to lacking the motivation and discipline to study for it, as his reports from the School for Gifted Unicorns attest. He was, however, capable of drawing upon large reserves of magic, but had insufficient skill to wield it properly.]
“Blueblood!” I heard Daring Do scream above the din of my own thoughts. I spun around to see her up in the air, hovering just behind the closest of the huge statues, pushing between its shoulders to try and send it toppling over. In the distance, through the gloom, a multitude of bilious green lights glowed, accompanied by the sound of heavy hoofsteps on the crystal floor. They were coming, and they were already close.
She’d never tip the thing over on her own, but lacking wings to fly I could hardly help that way. Yet the upright rear legs of the statue were quite thin, being of a rather stylised design. I summoned enough magical energy to make my horn hurt and directed it as a blast to those legs. The shards emerged into view just as my magic struck the statue’s legs - there were a dozen now, lined up in ranks, their chests glowing with the light of their twisted, mutated souls, and their horns, lit with that foul magic, directed squarely at Yours Truly.
I heard Daring Do cry out with exertion. Where I had struck the crystal statue’s legs had cracked under the force of my magic, but it was enough. The cracks spread across the width of the statue’s limbs, and then shattered, and the entire top three quarters of this ancient monument came toppling down onto the shards, whereupon it shattered with a tremendous crash and broke into a pile of glittering rubble before us twice the height of a pony. A feeling of triumph swelled within me, but was quickly deflated when Daring Do swept down from above, landed, and shouted in my face.
“That won’t hold them for long,” she yelled. “Open the door!”
Biting back the instinct to demand a ‘please’ from her, I dashed back to the door. My horn still ached from the exertion just before, but still I poured as much raw magical power into the arcane lock as I dared to without burning myself out.
“More of them are waking up, sir!” Cannon Fodder shouted, his dull monotone only slightly inflected with something akin to panic.
That was enough to motivate me to push past my limit. White-hot daggers plunged into my brain. Just as my vision clouded at the edges, the world turned slightly grey, and my hooves began to tingle, the spell unravelled. The concentration of magical energy binding the door shut burst, and I felt the backlash as though I’d been punched square on the nose. Somewhat dazed, I hazily saw Daring Do and Cannon Fodder through the stars before my eyes together buck the crystal door wide open, whereupon it struck the adjacent wall with a hefty thud.
“Come on!” She grabbed my foreleg, and, being much stronger than she looked, pulled me through the door. My hooves obeyed the command to run about half a second later, and together the three of us scrambled into the corridor, pausing briefly to slam the door behind us as though that might stop our pursuers, and fled into the dark corridor.